Optimal Generation Start-Up Methodology for Power System Restoration Considering Conventional and Non-Conventional Renewable Energy Sources

Power system restoration must be accomplished as soon as possible after a blackout. In this process, available black-start (BS) units are used to provide cranking power to non-black-start (NBS) units so as to maximize the overall power system generation capacity. This procedure is known as the generation start-up problem, which is intrinsically combinatorial with complex non-linear constraints. This paper presents a new mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for the generation start-up problem that integrates non-conventional renewable energy sources (NCRES) and battery energy storage systems (BESS). The main objective consists of determining an initial starting sequence for both BS and NBS units that would maximize the generation capacity of the system while meeting the non-served demand of the network. The nature of the proposed model leads to global optimal solutions, clearly outperforming heuristic and enumerative approaches, since the latter may take higher computational time while the former do not guarantee global optimal solutions. Several tests were carried out on the IEEE 39-bus test system considering BESS as well as wind and solar generation. The results showed the positive impact of NCRES in the restoration processes and evidenced the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed approach. It was found that including NCRES and BESS in the restoration process allows a reduction of 24.4% of the objective function compared to the classical restoration without these technologies.