Executive Summary

Power industry provides backbone for a country’s growth and development and is one of the most important utilities that underpin the survival of a nation’s critical industrial infrastructures and services. It is, therefore, very important to plan generation, distribution and transmission of electric power for current and also for future needs. The current imbalance between available energy supplies and increasing energy demand in Pakistan has necessitated rolling blackouts and renewed requests for conservation. With the increase in energy demand, Independent Power Plants (IPP’s) were introduced few years ago. The birth of a deregulated power industry in Pakistan brought new challenges for Pakistan WAPDA in terms of managing the IPP’s for their power generation, distribution, overall billing and invoice management. WAPDA has established a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with these private energy producers to handle energy purchase related issues. According to the PPA, IPP’s have to declare their available capacity 12 months, 3 months, 3 days and 24 hours in advance for medium term and short term available generation capacity.

This project proposes to develop an intelligent decision making system that can forecast accurately short-term, long-term and real-time energy requirements and facilitate in most economic unit commitment and in planning efficient and least cost power generation; that applies to multiple sites in different seasons and is suitable for customized requirements.

Load forecasting emerged as a natural requirement for IPP’s and there is also a direct need at National Transmission & Dispatch Company (NTDC) for such a system. In order to meet this requirement an intelligent software system for Pakistan WAPDA based on NTDC’s business requirements is proposed that would assist WAPDA mainly in making precise unit commitment with IPP’s and decision making process for load flow distribution. It will facilitate NTDC to manage power flows, based on metering data collected from IPP’s, local meteorological information and water flow conditions. This proposed system can be used to predict future requirements of energy and also for forecasting the load, for unit commitment in Short and Long term, to ensure economical operations at WAPDA.

The key benefits of this project are given below:

• It will develop a load forecasting system for WAPDA for short term, medium term and long term loads using analytical and intelligent modeling that is fit for our customized requirements.
• It will suffice a major need of the power industry in Pakistan for a transparent and uniform implementation of WAPDA procedures and regulations with IPP’s.
• It will provide more accurate, real time merit order list (merit order is the Sorted/ Prioritized list of available surplus capacity of IPP and various costs).
• The system will provide WAPDA with the tools for optimal decision making for cost effective unit commitment with the most economic surplus capacity by various IPP’s. The unit commitment will therefore be based on a more accurate and real time merit order list.