Volta - Advanced Scheduling Adviser

The Volta programme is aimed at developing new tools for the control room to include novel technologies that will advance the capability in the Electricity National Control Centre (ENCC).
 

NESO’s Control Room Energy Team currently schedules generating units (via balancing or capacity market) at day-ahead and up to 4-hours ahead timescales, based on a heavily manual and iterative (47-step) analysis process of supply and demand (via the margin analysis curve).  

This project will investigate whether an Advanced Scheduling Advisor (ASA) AI solution can be developed to recommend and test scenarios for scheduling of generating units from day-ahead up to 4 hours ahead. The project will be delivered in two parts, firstly comprising a design and development roadmap for a scheduler, and secondly, developing the PoC for deployment. 

Benefits

The innovation project is aiming to identify whether the following could be achieved by testing design and proof of concept of the advanced scheduling adviser: 

• Time savings for scheduling team; enabling them to focus on more complex scenarios and respond more quickly.
• Reduced risk to security of supply by addressing increasing scheduling complexity.
• Improved planning flexibility to accommodate the growing impact of renewables, for example, incorporating assets like batteries that haven’t traditionally been considered by the control room.
• Simplified onboarding of new BMUs, through tool integration rather than requiring control room staff to be trained on their existence.
• Reduced reliance on scarce SME resource and smoother onboarding of new control room staff.
• Enhanced decision-making capabilities, allowing optimisation for multiple objectives beyond just security of supply (e.g. cost efficiency, carbon intensity). 

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