  Reliable operation in power systems is becoming more difficult as the
penetration of random renewable resources increases. In particular, operators
face the risk of not scheduling enough traditional generators in the times when
renewable energies becomes lower than expected. In this paper we study the
optimal trade-off between system and risk, and the cost of scheduling reserve
generators. We explicitly model the ramping constraints on the generators. We
model the problem as a multi-period stochastic control problem, and we show the
structure of the optimal dispatch. We then show how to efficiently compute the
dispatch using two methods: i) solving a surrogate chance constrained program,
ii) a MPC-type look ahead controller. Using real world data, we show the chance
constrained dispatch outperforms the MPC controller and is also robust to
changes in the probability distribution of the renewables.
