Multi-Station Equivalents for Short-Term Hydropower Scheduling

Hydropower scheduling in day-ahead electricity markets is complex due to uncertainty in the electricity price. Internal cascade dependency of hydro power plants can also increase this complexity. One way to overcome this complexity is to replace the original hydropower system by an equivalent system, which provides simulation results sufficiently close to the ones of the original system. This paper presents a method to obtain multi-station equivalent models using a bilevel optimization problem, where the objective is to minimize the difference in outcomes between the original and the equivalent models. This bilevel problem is then transformed into a single-level optimization problem that can be solved using standard optimization techniques. Finally, the errors between the simulation results of the original and equivalent hydropower models are computed and analyzed for a Swedish system to show the accuracy of different multi-station equivalents.