4 December 2020

Research pic: Minimising the negawatts - "Negawatt planning via stochastic programming"

Supply and demand…when it comes to power generation if supply outweighs demand it can get very uneconoical as fuel is used at prodigious rates in conventional power stations to produce wattage that goes to waste. Writing in the Asian Journal of Management Science and Applications, a team from Japan discusses the concept of “negawatts” – negative watts – and how they might be traded when power supply exceeds demand.

Masahiro Yamada, Tomoki Fukuba, and Takayuki Shiina of Waseda University in Shinjuku and Ken-ichi Tokoro of the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry in Kanagawa, suggest that vast daily fluctuations in the demand for electricity leads to huge and costly inefficiencies. The team has developed a stochastic programming model is formulated for a negawatt planning operation that can manage uncertainty in power demands, the probability of the customer’s failure to reduce it, and a way to optimise operations.

“The experimental results show that customers can choose an operation method tailored to their strategy while controlling the value of the failure probability,” the team explains. “Compared to using a deterministic model, this stochastic programming model ensures high profits and a stable supply to consumers,” they add. The team concludes that with their approach, negawatt planning can be made profitable for the consumer and a stable supply can be attained for the supplier. Such approaches will be essential for many years to come until viable technology for large-scale electricity storage are available and ubiquitous.

Yamada, M., Fukuba, T., Shiina, T. and Tokoro, K. (2020) ‘Negawatt planning via stochastic programming’, Asian J. Management Science and Applications, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp.40–55

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