A Distributed Solution to the Adjustable Robust Economic Dispatch Problem

The problem of maintaining balance between consumption and production of electric energy in the presence of a high share of intermittent power sources in a transmission grid is addressed. A distributed, asynchronous optimization algorithm, based on the ideas of cutting-plane approximations and adjustable robust counterparts, is presented to compute economically optimal adjustable dispatch strategies. These strategies guarantee satisfaction of the power balancing constraint as well as of the operational constraints for all possible realizations of the uncertain power generation or demand. The communication and computational effort of the proposed distributed algorithm increases for each computational unit only slowly with the number of participants, making it well suited for large scale networks. A distributed implementation of the algorithm and a numerical study are presented, which show the performance in asynchronous networks and its robustness against packet loss.