GENCO's Risk-Based Maintenance Outage Scheduling

This paper presents a stochastic model for the optimal risk-based generation maintenance outage scheduling based on hourly price-based unit commitment in a generation company (GENCO). Such maintenance outage schedules will be submitted by GENCOs to the ISO for approval before implementation. The objective of a GENCO is to consider financial risks when scheduling its midterm maintenance outages. The GENCO also coordinates its proposed outage scheduling with short-term unit commitment for maximizing payoffs. The proposed model is a stochastic mixed integer linear program in which random hourly prices of energy, ancillary services, and fuel are modeled as scenarios in the Monte Carlo method. Financial risks associated with price uncertainty are considered by applying expected downside risks which are incorporated explicitly as constraints. This paper shows that GENCOs could decrease financial risks by adjusting expected payoffs. Illustrative examples show the calculation of GENCO's midterm generation maintenance schedule, risk level, hourly unit commitment, and hourly dispatch for bidding into energy and ancillary services markets.