With increasing penetration of renewable energy and active market participation, power system operation scenarios and patterns have increased exponentially. This has led to challenges in identifying a good subset of scenarios for routine planning, operation, and emerging machine learning applications. To address these challenges, we develop an approach integrating comprehensive exploratory data analyses and smart sampling techniques to identify and select a small subset of representative power system scenarios that maintain the coverage of system scenarios and operation envelope, therefore, leading to very efficient, yet representative studies and analysis. We propose a hierarchical Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) technique for smart sampling, which allows free-form distributions of system load and considers generator commitment status along with generation levels. A set of performance metrics are also defined for systematic evaluation of the adequacy and efficiency of the sampled cases. The developed approach and metrics are demonstrated using the Texas 2000 bus system in this paper and will be extended to the more complex real world systems such as Western Interconnect System.

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Portland General Electric (PGE), an investor-owned electric utility serving nearly 900,000 customers in 51 Oregon cities, joined Western Energy Imbalance Market (EIM) -a California Independent System Operator (CAISO) platform for sharing cleaner and more efficient generation resources among multiple states in the Western U.S. While participation in EIM brings a new set of economic opportunities for PGE by capturing flexibility needs in the market, it also changes operational patterns (e.g., more frequent start/stop, off-nominal power output, and ramping) of PGE's conventional generation fleet, including hydropower units. With 492 MW of hydropower capacity, which constitutes 15% of PGE's generation mix, it is important for PGE (as any other EIM-participant utility) to understand how participation in EIM impacts its hydropower assets, and how a techno-economically sustainable operation of those assets could be accomplished. In this paper, a case study is performed with PGE's hydropower generation facilities to assess and quantify EIMparticipation driven changes in hydropower operational patterns.

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