Power Systems Infrastructure Planning with High Renewables Penetration

Abstract

Abstract With the increasing penetration of renewable generating units, especially in remote areas not well connected with load demand, there is growing interest to co-optimize generation and transmission expansion planning (GTEP) in power systems. Due to the volatility in renewable generation, a planner needs to include the operating decisions into the planning model to guarantee feasibility. Three different formulations, i.e., a big-M formulation, a hull formulation, and an alternative big-M formulation, are reported for transmission expansion. To address the computational challenge, we propose a nested Benders decomposition algorithm and a tailored Benders decomposition algorithm that exploit the structure of the GTEP problem. Using a case study from Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), we are able to show that the proposed tailored Benders decomposition outperforms the nested Benders decomposition. The coordination in the optimal generation and transmission expansion decisions from the ERCOT study implies that there is an additional value in solving GEP and TEP simultaneously. The detailed results of this paper has been published in Li et al. (2021) .