Highlights

 By incorporating Superconducting magnetic energy storage systems (SMES) the daily load scheduling
of thermal units has a greater impact on optimal unit commitment
 In this paper, IEEE 10 unit thermal unit system is incorporated with and without SMES and the results
are analyzed.
 An effective Modified Lagrangian relaxation based Particle swarm optimization (LR-PSO) algorithm
is used for calculating the operating cost and the results are compared with existing algorithm.
 Further different ratings of SMES have been tested to find suitable capacity for integrating 10 unit 24-
h thermal system.
 300 MW SMES capacity is found to be optimal for 10 units 24-h thermal system and can be extended
to find optimal size of SMES for integrating with different thermal units such as 20 units, 40 units.