4 Presentations

• 
  09:00 AM - 09:25 AM

  Assessing Stochastic Optimization for Rio Tinto Alcan's Hydropower System in Eastern Canada

  • Pascal Côté, presenter, Rio Tinto
  • Marco Latraverse, Rio Tinto Alcan

  Rio Tinto Alcan (RTA) is a multinational aluminium producer with smelters in Quebec, Canada. RTA also owns and operates powerhouses on the Péribonka River. The system installed on the Péribonka River, which is run by RTA’s Quebec Power Operations Division, consists of 3 generating stations and 2 major reservoirs. One of the significant issues that had to be resolved for effective operation of this system was to determine the volume of water release per week for all generating stations. Stochastic optimization method is particularly interesting for RTA since, until now, the decision making process has been based on a deterministic solver although it is impossible to predict accurately the contribution of the natural inflows foe more than a few days. A lag-1 Stochastic Dynamic Programming (SDP) algorithm were implemented to optimize the power delivery by the generating stations. SDP method were compared with the actual deterministic decision procedure using a test bench into which were incorporated the characteristics of the facilities and the inflow scenarios database.

• 
  09:25 AM - 09:50 AM

  Equilibrium Prices from MIPs: Applications to Unit Commitment and Electric Capacity Expansion

  • David Fuller, presenter, University of Waterloo

  MIP market equilibrium models may have no solution with prices only for continuous variable
  commodities. O’Neill et‐al. proposed additional prices for binary variables, but there are shortcomings: negative prices; unfair price discrimination; revenue to producers may be unequal to that paid by consumers. Resolutions of these shortcomings are discussed.

• 
  09:50 AM - 10:15 AM

  Flood Risk Management for Small Hydropower Reservoirs

  • Mohammadhossein Alipour, presenter, University of British Columbia
  • Ziad Shawwash, University of British Columbia

  Operating hydropower reservoirs with small storage capacity is a challenging task which becomes even much more challenging during a high inflow or flooding period for two reasons. First, the objective of minimizing flood damage is added to the set of objectives that the operator must deal with and second, the available time for making a decision is short, preventing a thorough analysis and discussion of the best operating alternative. We present our research on risk informed decision analysis for operating reservoirs during high inflow events and we present results of a case study of a flood event of the Cheakamus River in British Columbia to illustrate the practical applicability of the methods and techniques we are developing.

• 
  10:15 AM - 10:40 AM

  A Goal Programming Algorithm to Incorporate the Columbia River Non-Power Flow Requirements in the BC Hydro Generalized Optimization Model

  • Ziad Shawwash, presenter, University of British Columbia

  We present the results of our research to incorporate non-power requirements in the BC Hydro Generalized Optimization Model (GOM). Our UBC/ BC Hydro research team developed a Goal Programming (GP) algorithm to solve the multi-objective reservoir optimization problem and we used the new GOM-GP model to perform a number of case studies to investigate the potential impacts of incorporating different non-power requirements in the Columbia River on the BC Hydro system. Specific Columbia River Treaty target flows at the Arrow reservoir in January affect the level of fulfillment of three of the non-power requirements: Flow Augmentation (FA) requirement to aid downstream migration of Salmon in the U.S, flow requirements protect Whitefish (WF) eggs during the spawning and hatching periods and the target flow level to provide enough water cover for Trout spawning (TS) downstream of Arrow.