Power generation cost optimization for Thermal power plants considering prohibited operation zones and power losses

Thermal power plants (TPPs) can produce and supply electricity to power system as a main power source but power generation fuel cost of the TPPs is very expensive. So, the target of minimizing the cost is considered as a main duty in power system operation. This is called economic load dispatch (ELD) problem. In this paper, a novel algorithm, tunicate swarm algorithm (TSA), is applied for solving the ELD problem. The applied TSA is implemented for test systems with different numbers of units and different constraints such as power balance constraints, prohibited operating zones, power losses and power output limits of generators. The first test system is comprised of 6 units considering power balance constraints, power output limits, prohibited working zones and power losses while the second test system consists of 20 units taking into account the power balance constraints, power output limits and power losses. TSA is compared to a high number of previous methods in terms of the cost and TSA is concluded to be a powerful method since it can find less or equal cost with other compared methods.