%0 Book Section %A Patrinos, Panagiotis %A Bernardini, Daniele %A Maffei, Alessandro %A Jokic, Andrej %A Bemporad, Alberto %B Proceedings of the IFAC 8th Power Plant and Power Systems Control Symposium %D 2012 %F eprints:1460 %I IFAC %K Smart grid; Model predictive control; Hierarchical control %P 741-746 %T Two-time-scale MPC for economically optimal real-time operation of balance responsible parties %U http://eprints.imtlucca.it/1460/ %X European electrical networks are evolving towards a distributed system where the number of power plants is growing and also the green plants based on renewable energy sources (RES) like wind and solar are increasing. Integration of RES leads to energy imbalance, due to the difficulty to predict their production. This paper proposes a two-time-scale Hierarchical Model Predictive Control (HMPC) strategy for real-time optimal control of Balance Responsible Parties (BRPs) in power systems with high penetration of renewable energy sources (RES). The proposed control strategy is able to handle ramp-rate constraints efficiently and results in reduced generation and imbalance costs due to real-time economic optimization of power setpoints.