Optimising power despatch: security constrained economic despatch initiative in Gujarat

The efficient, economic, and reliable operation of power systems is crucial for ensuring reliable electricity supply to the end users. As power system is evolving with increasing renewable energy integration, network complexity, and the need for real-time operational security, there is growing interest in upgrading existing despatch practices such as merit order despatch through advanced optimization techniques. Security constrained economic despatch (SCED) for state load despatch centres (SLDCs) is a complementary approach to support the transition towards smart, secure, and optimized power system operations. SCED incorporates all types of constraints like transmission constraints, generating unit constraints- declared capacity, technical minimum, ramp-up and ramp-down limits, etc. This work describes the SCED implementation for SLDC Gujarat from 15.06.2025-15.07.2025, for day-ahead and first window of real-time generation scheduling to take decision about the amount and price of power to be acquired from the electricity market. The optimization problem is formulated as linear programming to minimize the operational cost, respecting generating unit constraints (declared capacity, technical minimum, ramp-up, and ramp-down). The simulation study is carried out using the CPLEX solver in the GAMS software.