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Dynamic economic and emission dispatch (DEED) aims to optimally set the active power generation with constraints in a power system, which should target minimum operation cost and at the same time minimize the pollution in terms of emission when the load dynamically changes hour to hour. The purpose of this study is to achieve optimal economic and emission dispatch of an electrical system with a renewable generation mix, consisting of 3-unit thermal, 2-unit wind and 2-unit solar generators for dynamic load variation in a day. An improved version of a simple, easy to understand and popular optimization algorithm particle swarm optimization (PSO) referred to as a constriction factor-based particle swarm optimization (CFBPSO) algorithm is deployed to get optimal solution as compared to PSO, modified PSO and red deer algorithm (RDA).

Different model with and without wind and solar power generating systems; with valve point effect is analyzed. The thermal generating system (TGs) are the major green house gaseous emission producers on earth. To take up this ecological issue in addition to economic operation cost, the wind and solar energy sources are integrated with the thermal system in a phased manner for electrical power generation and optimized for dynamic load variation. This DEED being a multi-objective optimization (MO) has contradictory objectives of fuel cost and emission. To get the finest combination of the two objectives and to get a non-dominated solution the fuzzy decision-making (FDM) method is used herein, the MO problem is solved by a single objective function, including min-max price penalty factor on emission in the total cost to treat as cost. Further, the weight factor accumulation (WFA) technique normalizes the pair of objectives into a single objective by giving each objective a weightage. The weightage is decided by the FDM approach in a systematic manner from a set of non-dominated solutions. Here, the CFBPSO algorithm is applied to lessen the total generation cost and emission of the thermal power meeting the load dynamically.

The efficacy of the contribution of stochastic wind and solar power generation with the TGs in the dropping of net fuel cost and emission in a day for dynamic load vis-à-vis the case with TGs is established.

Cost and emission are conflicting objectives and can be handled carefully by weight factors and penalty factors to find out the best solution.

The proposed methodology and its strategy are very useful for thermal power plants incorporating diverse sources of generations. As the execution time is very less, practical implementation can be possible.

As the cheaper generation schedule is obtained with respect to time, cost and emission are minimized, a huge revenue can be saved over the passage of time, and therefore it has a societal impact.

In this work, the WFA with the FDM method is used to facilitate CFBPSO to decipher this DEED multi-objective problem. The results reveal the competence of the projected proposal to satisfy the dynamic load demand and to diminish the combined cost in contrast to the PSO algorithm, modified PSO algorithm and a newly developed meta-heuristic algorithm RDA in a similar system.

Economic load dispatch (ELD) is one of the crucial optimization problems in power system planning and operation. The ELD problem with valve point loading (VPL) and multi-fuel options (MFO) is defined as a non-smooth and non-convex optimization problem with equality and inequality constraints, which obliges an efficient heuristic strategy to be addressed. The purpose of this study is to present a new and powerful heuristic optimization technique (HOT) named as squirrel search algorithm (SSA) to solve non-convex ELD problems of large-scale power plants.

The suggested SSA approach is aimed to minimize the total fuel cost consumption of power plant considering their generation values as decision variables while satisfying the problem constraints. It confers a solution to the ELD issue by anchoring with foraging behavior of squirrels based on the dynamic jumping and gliding strategies. Furthermore, a heuristic approach and selection rules are used in SSA to handle the constraints appropriately.

Empirical results authenticate the superior performance of SSA technique by validating on four different large-scale systems. Comparing SSA with other HOTs, numerical results depict its proficiencies with high-qualitative solution and by its excellent computational efficiency to solve the ELD problems with non-smooth fuel cost function addressing the VPL and MFO. Moreover, the non-parametric tests prove the robustness and efficacy of the suggested SSA and demonstrate that it can be used as a competent optimizer for solving the real-world large-scale non-convex ELD problems.

This study has compared various HOTs to determine optimal generation scheduling for large-scale ELD problems. Consequently, its comparative analysis will be beneficial to power engineers for accurate generation planning.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this manuscript is the first research work of using SSA approach for solving ELD problems. Consequently, the solution to this problem configures the key contribution of this paper.