IE Seminar: “Optimal Hour-Ahead Commitment and Storage Decisions of Wind Power Producers”, Ece Cigdem Karakoyun, 1:30PM February 10 (EN)

Speaker: Ece Cigdem Karakoyun, Bilkent University

Date & Time: February 10, 2023, Friday 13:30

Place: EA-409

Title: Optimal Hour-Ahead Commitment and Storage Decisions of Wind Power
Producers

Abstract: We study the energy commitment, generation and storage problem
for a wind farm paired with a battery, over a finite planning horizon
with hourly periods. The power producer decides, in each hour, how much
energy to commit to selling to or purchasing from the market for the
upcoming hour, how much energy to generate in the wind power plant, and
how much energy to charge into or discharge from the battery. The
existence of the battery not only helps smooth out imbalances caused by
the fluctuating wind output but also enables price arbitrage in the
following two ways. First, the producer may benefit from buying energy
when the price is low and selling it when the price is high in the
future. Second, the producer may choose to let its dispatch or purchase
amount deviate from her commitments based on the latest available
information; its storage capacity provides additional support for these
intentional deviations. We model this problem as a Markov decision
process with random wind speed and electricity price. We prove the
optimality of a state-dependent threshold policy when the battery and
transmission line are perfectly efficient. We employ our structural
results to develop a heuristic solution procedure in a more general
problem where the battery and transmission line need not be perfectly
efficient. We also consider the case where the price can be negative.
Numerical experiments with data-calibrated instances have revealed the
high efficiency and scalability of our solution procedure: it
outperforms the standard dynamic programming algorithm with respect to
computation time by two orders of magnitude and yields solutions with an
average distance of less than one percent from the optimal profit.

Bio: Ece Cigdem Karakoyun is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the
Department of Industrial Engineering at Bilkent University. Her research
mainly addresses challenges at the interface of operations and design in
the energy industry for both supply and demand sides. She is
particularly interested in the operations of low-carbon emerging
technologies (e.g., variable renewable energy resources, storage, and
hybrid systems) in wholesale electricity markets and integrating these
technologies into market operations while maintaining operational
flexibility. She is also interested in energy demand-side management,
particularly demand response and distributed energy sources. She
received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Industrial Engineering from
Bilkent University.