Impacts of load pattern variation in iran power system on generation system planing

During last decade, the electricity demand in Iran grows up more than 8% per year due to an increasing economic growth. The main part of this load growth is related to industrial and agricultural demand. At this period, electric utilities tried to provide the peak load demand using all different types of available generating units especially with hydro generation plants. However, moving the time of peak demand occurring from night hours to day time and also increasing of load demand at mid day hours, created a new challenge to hydro-generation planning. As the number of daily peak hours increases from the nightly to daily peak hours and considering that Iran is a sub-tropical country, use of hydro power plant for the whole peak hours is not possible. In this paper, an overview of generation planning of hydro power plants will be done for the next 5 years in Iran considering variation in the load demand pattern