Quantum Assisted Stochastic Economic Dispatch for Renewables Rich Power Systems

Abstract: Considering widely dispersed uncertain renewable energy sources (RESs), scenario-based stochastic optimization is an effective method for the economic dispatch of renewables-rich power systems. However, on classic computers, to simulate RES uncertainties with high accuracy, the massive scenario generation is very time-consuming, and the pertinent optimization problem is high-dimensional NP-hard mixed-integer programming. To this end, we design a quantum-assisted scheme to accelerate the stochastic optimization for power system economic dispatch without losing accuracy. We first propose the unified quantum amplitude estimation to characterize RES uncertainties, thereby generating massive scenarios by a few qubits to reduce state variables. Then, strong Benders cuts corresponding to some specific scenarios are selected to control the solution scale of Benders master problem in the iterative process, all of which are implemented by customized quantum approximation optimization algorithms. Finally, we perform numerical experiments on the modified IEEE 6-bus system to test the designed scheme.