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Abstract

The deregulation of the electric industry has motivated the companies involved in electricity business to optimize their system resources to remain competitive, but without overlooking the traditional objective of providing customers with an efficient and uninterrupted service. This requirement, in addition to the availability of detailed information on every specific system component, has encouraged the system operators to use optimization techniques for system planning and operation. One of the most important functions that the system operator performs is the system Economic Dispatch. Economic Dispatch guarantees that the electric load demand is allocated among the available generation system units in the most economical and efficient way possible. A detailed study and analysis of the factors influencing the performance of the generating system found that up to now old models and methods did not address and acknowledge the within-the-hour uncertainty in load prediction despite the fact that it is considered to be one of its main and most important inputs. Research on load forecasting have showed that the electric load forecasting techniques have been developed to the point where the magnitudes of errors have been optimized and further reduction of the error will be hard to achieve. Thus, the optimization opportunity for Economic Dispatch does not reside on spending more resources on achieving a more accurate load forecast, but on the fact that within-the hour load uncertainty can be modeled and exploited to provide quantitative information for decision making support. This research work uses a dynamic programming algorithm to allocate uncertainty in load forecast. The first method is a traditional approach that only considers the production costs for the economic dispatch decision, and the second one takes into account the seasonal variability in the load forecast error to find the most likely load increment to allocate and then provide the best dispatch scheme for the three largest plants in the BC Hydro's generating system.