Planning Curtailment of Renewable Generation in Power Grids

Abstract

The increasing penetration of renewable sources like solar energy add new dimensions in planning power grid operations. We study the problem of curtailing a subset of prosumers generating solar power with the twin goals of being close to a target collection and maintaining fairness across prosumers. The problem is complicated by the uncertainty in the amount of energy fed-in by each prosumer and the large problem size in terms of number of prosumers. To meet these challenges, we propose an algorithm based on the Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandit problem with an approximate Knapsack based oracle. With real-data on solar panel output across multiple prosumers, we are able to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.