Enhanced Security-Constrained Unit Commitment With Emerging Utility-Scale Energy Storage

We introduce emerging utility-scale energy storage (e.g., batteries) as part of the set of control measures in a corrective form of the security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC) problem. This enhanced SCUC (ESCUC) leverages utility-scale energy storage for multiple applications. In the base case, the storage units are optimally charged and discharged to realize economic operation. Immediately following a contingency, the injections of storage units are adjusted almost instantly to alleviate short-term emergency overloads, thereby avoiding potential cascading outages and giving slow ramping generating units time to adjust their output. The ESCUC is a large two-stage mixed-integer programming problem. A Benders decomposition has been developed to solve this problem. In order to achieve computational tractability, we present several acceleration techniques to improve the convergence of the proposed algorithm. Case studies on the RTS-79 and RTS-96 systems demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.