Spatio-temporal modeling of wind energy and applications to optimal operation of battery storage

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TransAlta Corporation is an electricity power generation company with headquarters in Calgary. They own and operate solar, wind, hydro, gas and coal power generation facilities, and their operations stretch across Canada with a total power generation capacity of 8775 MW. A large portion of its generators are situated in Alberta and they are participants in the Alberta electricity market.In this project, we will focus on the decision processes pertaining to TransAlta's operations in the day ahead electricity market of Alberta. The main decision problem that TransAlta faces on an hourly basis is determining the price quantity pairs for various power sources. Another decision problem that runs in parallel is battery storage. Because, TransAlta has the option to buy electricity and store it in battery units, and sell it at a later time when the demand is higher and/or the supply is low. One of our goals in this project is to enable TransAlta to integrate the spatio-temporal aspect of wind power into the forecasting of the aggregate wind power. In the long term, this will help TransAlta to better quantify the errors associated with the forecasts and hedge more effectively against the risks associated with the forecast errors. Also, we aim to derive a formulation of the battery storage decision problem as a Markov Decision Problem (MDP) which can be solved using modern optimization software.