Distributed Optimization Decomposition for Joint Economic Dispatch and Frequency Regulation

Abstract

Economic dispatch and frequency regulation are typically viewed as fundamentally different problems in power systems and, hence, are typically studied separately. In this paper, we frame and study a joint problem that co-optimizes both slow timescale economic dispatch resources and fast timescale frequency regulation resources. We show how the joint problem can be decomposed without loss of optimality into slow and fast timescale subproblems that have appealing interpretations as the economic dispatch and frequency regulation problems, respectively. We solve the fast timescale subproblem using a distributed frequency control algorithm that preserves network stability during transients. We solve the slow timescale subproblem using an efficient market mechanism that coordinates with the fast timescale subproblem. We investigate the performance of our approach on the IEEE 24-bus reliability test system.