Impact of environmental constraints in hydrothermal energy planning

In partnership with CCEE and CEPEL, in 2023 the study group “Energy planning and environmental constraints” focused on the impact that prioritizing multiple uses of water has on the the electric energy production systems, specially in predominantly hydro systems, which is the case of Brazil. To deal with environmental constraints in the long-term hydrothermal generation planning problem, the resulting large-scale multi-stage linear programming problem was modelled in JuMP and solved by stochastic dual dynamic programming. To assess if the development represented well the behavior of the Brazilian power system, the Julia formulation first was benchmarked with Brazil’s official model, Newave. Environmental constraints were introduced in this problem by two different approaches, one that represents the multiple uses of water by means of 0-1 variables, and another one that makes piecewise linear approximations of the relevant constraints. Numerical results show that penalties of slack variables strongly affect the obtained water values.