Optimization Benchmarking Report

Over the last decade, more intermittent renewable power has been introduced to the power grid, causing instabilities in the power grid and fluctuations in the price of electricity. Nuclear-renewable hybrid energy systems (NHES) have been proposed as a potential solution. These systems can take advantage of flexible loads and energy storage to more flexibly meet the demands of highly-dynamic power grids. Economical operation of these systems requires careful optimization. In this project, a simple NHES model is developed to capture the dynamic operational behavior of these systems. The operation of this model is then optimized to minimize economic costs. A series of optimizers and algorithms, including but not limited to SNOPT, SLSQP, Nelder-Mead, and Fmincon, are then benchmarked for the optimization process. The resulting strengths and weaknesses of each solver for this problem domain are then compared and reported.