Effect of Natural Gas Flow Dynamics in Robust Generation Scheduling Under Wind Uncertainty

A new challenge has arisen in power generation scheduling recently, as the rapid increase in the number of gas-fired units has made power systems more vulnerable to failures in natural gas networks. The large-scale integration of wind power further exacerbates the problem because gas-fired units are usually scheduled to catch up wind power uncertainty and thus lead to great variations in the state of gas network. To meet this challenge, it is necessary to commit and dispatch the gas-fired units considering both wind uncertainty and natural gas network security. However, the dynamic characteristics of gas flow are remarkably slower than those of power flow, which should be appropriately modeled to explore its benefits for power system operation. Because directly applying partial differential equations overly complicates the already complicated generation scheduling problem, we address this problem by proposing an approximated transient matrix-form gas flow model. A two-stage robust generation scheduling model is then proposed considering the dynamic security constraints of gas networks and the wind power uncertainty. Moreover, we successfully avoid the nonlinearity of gas flow constraints by developing a new solution methodology. Finally, an illustrative case is presented to demonstrate the effect of gas network dynamics in generation scheduling.