Optimum economic operation of coordinated power system based on turbulent water flow optimization

ABSTRACT Owing to increase in power demand, generation costs and environmental anxieties, renewable energy needs to be utilized to conserve energy and to reduce atmospheric pollutants. This study aims to present a new physics inspired metaheuristic algorithm, turbulent water flow optimization (TWFO) for scheduling the power generation of hydrothermal power systems incorporating with pumped storage units (PSU). TWFO is inspired by a natural phenomenon of action of whirlpools in water bodies. Different characteristics of power plants including valve point effect, transmission losses and multiple fuel sources are considered. A heuristic constraint handling mechanism is embedded in the proposed method to satisfy all the equality and inequality constraints. To exemplify the effectiveness of the TWFO, the proposed method has been validated on three coordinated power generation scheduling problems with different characteristics, and compared with particle swarm optimization, sine cosine algorithm, Harris hawks optimization, and other state-of-the-art techniques in the literature. Numerical results clearly signify that the TWFO is competent to obtain superior solutions than the other compared approaches, both in the quality of the solutions and the rate of convergence. Moreover, the fuel cost attained by the TWFO addressing PSU is lesser than that without addressing PSU. The proposed work ensures the economic operation of coordinated power system and increases the renewable energy utilization.