Forecasting and Low-Carbon Demand Response Scheduling of Crane-Group Station-Service Loads for Grid-Friendly Hydropower Station Operation

Net power injection at the point of common coupling (PCC) is an important indicator of grid-friendly hydropower operation. High-power station-service equipment may consume regulation margin and cause short-term power disturbances if it is not coordinated with unit dispatch and automatic generation control (AGC) tracking. This paper models hydropower-station crane groups as safety-bounded, forecastable, and dispatchable station-service flexibility resources, and proposes a forecast-embedded low-carbon demand response framework. The framework develops a PCC-coupled station-service model, uses phase-aware probabilistic forecasting to generate crane consumption templates, regeneration templates, and uncertainty intervals, and coordinates rigid, semi-flexible, and flexible crane tasks through rolling mixed-integer optimization to reduce station-service peaks, PCC tracking deviations, and carbon-opportunity costs. A station-oriented digital validation case shows that, while satisfying all task deadlines and safety constraints, the proposed method reduces the representative-day station-service peak by 16.1%, PCC RMSE by 55.1%, and carbon-opportunity cost by 29.7%, and increases regenerative-energy utilization from 54.8% to 86.8%, compared with earliest-start scheduling. An archive replay on an actual hydropower station with a 15.00 MW installed crane fleet then shows that start-time shifting remains available under that station’s work-order windows. On a high-duty maintenance day the representative-day peak falls by 15.4%, and over 20 high- duty days the mean peak falls by 17.3%, while regenerative utilization rises from 65.6% to 90.0%. The two evaluations indicate that crane groups at stations that issue work-order-based crane tasks with usable flexibility windows can be co-scheduled as station-service flexibility resources with phase structure, safety boundaries, and temporal regulation value. The reported magnitudes are those of the two cases and are not claimed for other layouts.