The main objective of this paper is to develop a distributed model using grid environment through which the economic Load dispatch solutions of multi-area power systems can be obtained continuously. Grid computing is a viable solution in order to exploit the enormous amount of computing power available across Internet to solve large interconnected power system problems. A grid service model is proposed for economic Load dispatch, which provides the solutions at specific intervals of time. The proposed model is designed in such a way that any node in the grid can provide the economic Load dispatch (ELD) solution. The node which serves as a server node at a specific instance in the grid can obtain the power system data from other client grid nodes and responds with economic Load dispatch solutions. The proposed model is highly distributed and has inherent features of scalability, reliability and also uses all available computing power, hence economic feasibility of analyzing power system problems was taken care implicitly.

This paper presents a new solution method to efficiently handle non-convexity stemmed from valve points in the economic Load dispatch problem. The proposed solution technique integrates both the advantage of fast solution algorithms of linear programming and powerful solution techniques of nonlinear programming to find the global solution. In the first step of the proposed solution framework, non-convex terms are replaced by some linear segments and the new linear model solved by modern fast algorithms. In the second step, a nonlinear programming algorithm as a powerful local search algorithm solves the original non-convex model to improve the solution obtained in the previous step. By exploiting the main strength of linear and nonlinear programming algorithms, the proposed solution approach can quickly converge to nearly the global solution method. By experimental results on three test cases with different sizes, we show that the presented method outperforms the other algorithms published in the literature in the quality of the solution.