Assessment of Energy System Planning

Abstract

This paper proposes an inverse optimization approach for assessing plans for a national energy system. Present energy system plans are built with consideration of not only the system cost (facility and operation costs) but also various non-economic factors such as supply vulnerability, public acceptance of plant siting and environmental pollution. However these factors are usually only implicitly taken into account. In other words the plan is built on the principle of minimizing total system cost and is then subsequently modified by the planner's subjective view.The purpose of this paper is to examine the planner's view on these non-economic factors quantitatively and as a part of the criterion function of the system model. To this end the entire plan is assumed to be a consequence of optimizing the quadratic utility of the system which involves both average facility and fuel costs and their variances. The authors propose firstly to evaluate these variances from the existing plans in the form of the solutions to the so-called inverse optimization problem and then to modify the plans in the usual way for the planning of an energy system.The methodology thus developed is applied to the energy plan of Japan and the results are shown.