Trade-off analysis of CO2 versus cost by multi-objective unit commitment

In response to the Kyoto protocol, the European Union (EU) introduced the Emission Trading Scheme (ETS), which adopts `cap-and-trade' market mechanism for CO2 emission trading. In this scheme, the emission allowances are allocated to each industrial installation and companies can buy and sell their allowances. In the electric power sector, the development of decision-making methods concerning emission trading is becoming increasingly important. For this reason, we focus our attention on the trade-off analysis between CO2 and cost for the unit commitment problem. The marginal cost of CO2 reduction can be obtained when the combination of generators and the fuel prices are decided. In this paper, we present an approach of trade-off analysis between CO2 emission and cost for unit commitment problem, which is based on the decommitment procedure of unit commitment to obtain Pareto-optimal curves of cost versus CO2 emission. The method is tested on the 10-unit 24-hour model.