Flexible transmission expansion planning with uncertainties in an electricity market

Deregulation of the electric power industry has introduced new uncertainties for market participants and made planning of transmission expansion more difficult. More flexible transmission expansion plans are needed, to cope with the increased risks. In this paper, a novel planning approach is proposed to meet the above challenge. In our approach, the planning process is modeled as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, so that conflicting objectives can be optimized simultaneously. To minimize planning risks, our method identifies several scenarios based on statistics and expert knowledge; the most flexible expansion plan is selected as the plan that has least adaptation cost. The proposed method is tested with the IEEE 14-bus system. Promising results are obtained to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Index Terms--Electricity market, optimization, power system planning, risk management.