Planning in Smart Grids

The electricity supply chain is changing, due to increasing awareness for sustainability and an improved energy efficiency. The traditional infrastructure where demand is supplied by centralized generation is subject to a transition towards a Smart Grid. In this Smart Grid, sustainable generation from renewable sources is accompanied by controllable distributed generation, distributed storage and demand side load management for intelligent electricity consumption. The transmission and distribution grid have to deal with increasing fluctuations in demand and supply. Since realtime balance between demand and supply is crucial in the electricity network, this increasing variability is undesirable. Monitoring and controlling/managing this infrastructure increasingly depends on the ability to control distributed appliances for generation, consumption and storage. In the development of control methodologies, mathematical support, which consists of predicting demand, solving planning problems and controlling the Smart Grid in realtime, is of importance. In this thesis we study planning problems which are related to the Unit Commitment Problem: for a set of generators it has to be decided when and how much electricity to produce to match a certain demand over a time horizon. The planning problems that we formulate are part of a control methodology for Smart Grids, called TRIANA, that is developed at the University of Twente.