A Cost-Minimizing Approach for Coordinating Short-Term Unit Outages

"How should outages of generating units be coordinated to minimize the total system production costs?" To help answer this question, the control staff at Virginia Electric and Power Company (VEPCO) has been using a unit-commitment program that has a global-optimization capability. The purpose of this paper is to review the outage-coordination problem from a system operator's perspective, describe a method that is currently used at VEPCO to coordinate short-term unit outages, and present actual case studies to illustrate practical applications.