Consistent with sound business practice and the Agency’s stewardship responsibilities, Reclamation is continuously striving to identify and apply advanced approaches allowing the operation of Reclamation hydropower plants in a more efficient manner—generating more electricity per acre-foot of water released.
One of the challenges of efficient hydropower generation is the matter of setting short-term generation schedules from multiple sources. On at least an hourly basis, Reclamation’s power plant operators must determine the best combination of generator units to bring online, and at what levels, given the existing demand for electricity and other operating costs and constraints. This is known as the economic dispatch problem. Substantial gains can be realized from even small improvements in dispatch efficiency. For example, increasing the generation efficiency at Glen Canyon Dam by 2 percent would yield over four million dollars (in 2004 dollars) annually.
Recently, a number of new optimization heuristics have been described. These algorithms do not rely on traditional calculus-based approaches but instead are based on innovative search techniques drawn from biological and physical processes. Although computationally intensive, these methods can solve difficult constrained optimization problems, like the economic dispatch problem, quickly and reliably.
