One of the main concerns of power system restructuring in developing countries is to divest the asset to private sector. This divestment for electricity distribution companies is more critical and has a vital role in the electricity supply chain because of vicinity to customer. This paper applies the valuation approach for electricity distribution companies. For valuation of the companies, Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model is used and Terminal Value (TV) model is applied to forecast future costs and incomes of companies in a stable manner. Systematic risks of these companies are taken into account by using Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM). Five Iranian electricity distribution companies are selected and considered technically and economically to obtain their valuations. As a result, these companies are ranked based on their valuations and technical factors. تفاصيل المقالة

Wind energy as a main part of renewable energy has important role in many electricity industries, because of increasing concerns about environmental impacts of conventional power plants fuels. Wind power integration in the electricity system operation has some technical and economic effects because of the intermittent and variety nature of wind power production. Therefore, it is important for every utility or system operator to consider these technical or economical aspects especially as unit commitment problem. One of the most important strategies for increasing profits of each utility is integrating the wind power resources with limited energy resources such as pumped storage (PS) plants. Pumped storage can provide some of the flexibility that power system operators need to balance load and generation in an uncertain environment, and thus enhance a power system’s ability to incorporate wind power. This paper presents a new approach for solving the weekly unit commitment including wind farms and PS plants. For this purpose, the modified PSO mechanism is recommended. The proposed PSO is applied to two test systems (which are included two wind farms and one PS plant) and the results of this modified PSO are compared with the conventional PSO. Evaluation of the results of these test systems’ solutions show that better optimal schedules are obtained. تفاصيل المقالة

Increasing penetration of renewable energy resources, especially wind power in power system operation, has some technical and economic effects because of the variable and uncertain nature of these resources. Therefore, it is very important for system operators to consider these behaviors necessary to solve the problem in this regard, especially generation scheduling problem. One of the most important strategies to increase the benefit of power system operation is to manage and control of wind power generation using pumped storage plants. A pumped storage plant can be used to provide added value to a wind farm to manage power output uncertainties. This paper presents a new approach for solving the weekly generation scheduling including wind farms and pumped storage plants. The hybrid PSO mechanism is suggested to solve this scheduling problem based on implementation of bacterial foraging concepts. The proposed PSO is applied to two test systems (which are included two wind farms and one pumped storage plant) and the results of this modified PSO are compared with the conventional PSO. Evaluation of the results of these test systems’ solutions show that better optimal schedules are obtained. تفاصيل المقالة