Smart Transmission Expansion Planning Based on Unconventional High Surge Impedance Loading Line Designs

Abstract

This paper introduces a new concept that we call smart transmission expansion planning (TEP) based on unconventional high surge impedance Loading (HSIL) line designs that will revolutionize power delivery. To date, these two areas (TEP and transmission line design) have been conducted separately. For TEP, planners use the electrical parameters of a few standard conventional line designs to study planning scenarios, and then, the final candidate line is constructed. In such a sequence, cost-effective scenarios often do not meet the technical criteria of load flow. This paper will demonstrate that this sequence can be overturned; namely, a transmission expansion planner can get optimal line parameter values that will lead to the most cost-effective scenario, and then a transmission line for those parameters is designed. Although this cannot currently be realized through conventional designs, we demonstrate in this paper that this becomes a possibility by using the breakthrough designs for transmission lines by shifting phase configurations and sub-conductors into unconventional HSIL arrangements, leading to the optimal line parameters determined by TEP. Several case studies are simulated, and it is shown that using unconventional HSIL lines can lead to an overall least expensive scenario, considering both capital cost for new transmission lines and the cost related to network power loss.