(544f) Smart Grid Coordination of an IGCC Plant: Comparison of Multi-Stage Stochastic Programming and Empc

The Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) possesses a number of benefits over traditional power generation plants, ranging from increased energy conversion efficiency to flex-fuel and carbon capture opportunities. A less known benefit of the IGCC configuration is the ability to load track electricity market prices. The idea being that material storage can be used to time-shift power production away from periods of low power value to periods of high power value.

Due to the uncertainty of electricity prices, the problem of sizing material storage units within the process must be formulated as a stochastic program. However, rather than being a fairly simple two-stage stochastic program, the dynamics imposed by the storage devices requires the formulation to be of the far more challenging multistage class. Due to the computationally intense nature of multistage stochastic programming, many have advocated the use of Economic MPC. The objective of this work is to provide a head-to-head comparison of feedback policies generated from multi-stage stochastic programming and EMPC. This comparison of policies provides a validation of EMPC based equipment design procedures.