Validation of hydrothermal test cases for economic analysis

In 2007 the IEEE Working group (WG) on Test Systems for Economic Analysis was created, with the main objective of providing validated test systems (or test cases) of electric power systems for economic analysis [1]. In the panel session of this WG in the 2010 IEEE-PES General Meeting, the works [2], [3] presented a number of test cases for hydrothermal systems. Test cases in [2] were based on the real Chilean system, and test cases in [3] were based on IEEE-based test cases, which were linked to thermal data from the literature and hydro data based on the real Brazilian system. As a next step in the elaboration of these test cases, this paper performs a validation analysis of the data proposed in these two previous papers, and presents some variants on those base cases in order to make them more flexible for use in general applications, which may use different levels of detail in the representation of the constraints and cost functions of the hydro plants, thermal plants and the electrical network. Finally, we tested linear, nonlinear, and mixed-integer linear formulations of optimal scheduling problems based on these cases, in order to obtain estimation of the optimal solutions of these problems, that may be used as starting points for benchmarking purposes among several solving strategies.