LINDO API
by Lindo Systems
Forecasting The Energy Market
Optimising the scheduling, dispatching and transmission for electricity supply systemsAustralian based Global-Roam developed a forecasting tool for the energy market. The tool can be applied to scheduling, dispatching, and transmission of any interconnected competitive electricity supply system from generator to load point. The objective is to minimise the cost of providing electricity to the aggregated system load given price bids by every generator. The constraints include minimum and maximum capacity for generation units, maximum transmission line flows, spinning reserve levels, and the overall supply and demand balance.
With the present model, the tool can easily optimise the scheduling and dispatch of around 250 million megawatts of energy per year to 15 million people – a $7.5 billion per year problem, which can include hundreds of generators, distributors, and retailers. The tool has also been used to model supply to 400 million people in Northern China.
Given the sheer size of the problem, Global-Roam decided to use linear programming as the optimisation technique. "Global-roam chose LINDO for the LP engine after a great deal of research into many other commercially available packages," stated Ben Vanderwaal, Senior Software Engineer for Global-Roam. "LINDO was selected for its particular attention to run-time licence agreements, and its capability for easy upgrading to support larger models. LINDO Systems also gave the most feedback from sales staff during the search for the best LP engine, as well as provided a comprehensive website and excellent demonstration version."