Uncertainty-Aware Methods for Leveraging Water Pumping Flexibility for Power Networks

Abstract: Recent work has demonstrated that water supply pumps in the drinking water distribution network can be leveraged to provide flexibility to the power network, but existing approaches are computationally demanding and/or overly conservative. In this paper, we develop a computationally tractable probabilistic approach to schedule and control water pumping to provide voltage support to the power distribution network subject to power and water distribution network constraints under power demand uncertainty. Building upon robust and chance-constrained reformulation approaches, we analytically reformulate the probabilistic problem into a deterministic one and solve for the scheduled pump operation and the control policy parameters that adjust the pumps based on the power demand forecast error realizations. In a case study, we compare our proposed approach to an adjustable robust method and investigate the performance in terms of computation time, cost, and empirical violation probabilities. We find that our proposed approach is computationally tractable and is less conservative than the robust approach, indicating that our formulation would be scalable to larger networks.