Published Resources Details
Journal Article
- Title
- An application of digital computers to power system planning
- In
- Electrical and Mechanical Engineering Transactions
- Imprint
- vol. 1, Institution of Engineers Australia, May 1959, pp. 17-
- Abstract
The planning studies required for an electrical power system frequently necessitate consideration of the detailed operation of the system over future periods of many years. The labour involved in this work, if proper allowance is to be made for economic power station operation, spinning reserve requirements and for the interaction of station operations, one on another, is very large if manual techniques are employed. The adoption of automatic computing procedures has achieved improved accuracy, closer simulation of actual operating conditions and very greatly increased speed and consistency of results. This permits many more alternatives to be usefully examined. Details are given of a computer technique which has been used by The Electricity Commission of New South Wales employing UTECOM, the Deuce high speed general purpose digital computer installed at the N.S.W. University of Technology.
The programme prepared by the authors provides for the computer to be supplied with plant cost characteristics, starting-up costs, details of seasonal load curves for week days and week ends, transmission loss constants, minimum system spinning reserve requirements and any special restraints resulting from requirements of system operation and technical restrictions on plant operation. Provided with this data, the computer programme is designed to select the most economic combination of plant which should be in service to supply the system load and to provide the necessary level of spinning reserve. The load is then distributed between the generating units in service for maximum economy, making provision for transmission losses if required. This procedure is repeated for the load steps of one or more selected system load curves and, if required, the computer prints out details of the optimum station loadings, actual system spinning reserve and system incremental cost for each step of these load curves. In addition, the programme provides a running total of station coal consumption, system operating costs, plant service hours, station energy output and transmission losses. Typical results obtained by the application of this computer to system planning studies are included.