OPTIMUM EXPANSION PLANNING OF AN UNCONVENTIONAL GENERATION SYSTEM OPERATING IN PARALLEL WITH A LARGE-SCALE NETWORK

This paper describes a package developed at the National Technical University of Athens which determines the optimal expansion policy over a period of N years for a limited size generation system consisting of wind generators (WECs) and photovoltaic (PV) panels operating in parallel with a large scale network. The produced energy from the wind generators and the photovoltaic panels is directly injected to the local grid or transmitted to the interconnected system. Given the meteorological data of the installation area, historical load data, the characteristics of the proposed additions (WECs and PV panels), the cost of the energy and the associated escalation rate, the package finds the optimal expansion policy for the period of next N years, utilizing a dynamic programming algorithm.