Economic Dispatch with Integrated Wind-thermal using Particle Swarm Optimization

The Economic dispatch is an important optimization task in power system. Thermal power plants are the major electrical energy producers. Need for renewable energy occurs due to the extinction of fossil fuels. Hence, it is necessary to operate these renewable plants with the thermal plants. In India, especially in Tamilnadu, Wind is the renewable plant which is widely available. The problem with the wind plant is its unpredictability.Hence, better wind thermal coordination economic dispatch method is necessary to integrate wind power reliably and efficiently. In this paper, Particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique is utilized to coordinate the wind and thermal generation dispatch and to minimize the total production cost. Ten units of thermal system incorporating wind power plant is utilized for numerical simulation. Different simulations with and without wind power production are simulated. Simulation result shows the effectiveness of wind power generation in reducing total fuel cost when compared with the genetic algorithm.