A Quantum Approach for Tactical Capacity Management of Distributed Electricity Generation

Matching electricity demand and supply by decentralised generators will be very important in the near future, where more and more electricity has to be produced sustainably. Optimisation problems that address this problem often have quadratic objective functions or constraints, due to the quadratic nature of energy loss. Where classical solvers struggle with quadratic, often integer or binary, optimisation problems, quantum computing (inspired) solvers are well equipped for this kind of problems. In this paper, we present such an optimisation problem and the performance of the quantum annealer in solving this problem, in comparison with classical methods and commercial solvers. We show that the hybrid, quantum-classical, solvers provided by D-Wave can outperform classical solvers despite the small-scale of the available quantum hardware