Stochastic Optimization Formulations for Reliability Unit Commitment Runs

To address the uncertainties caused by the penetration of intermittent renewable energy, most ISOs/RTOs perform day-ahead and look-ahead reliability unit commitment (RUC) runs, ensuring sufficient generation capacity available in real time to accommodate the uncertainties. Two-stage stochastic optimization models have been studied extensively to strengthen the RUC runs, while multi-stage stochastic optimization models were barely studied. In this paper, we investigate the unit commitment and economic dispatch decision differences generated by these two approaches considering the load uncertainties in the system. The stochasticity is represented by a set of scenarios for the two-stage model and a scenario tree for the multi-stage case.