Robust Transmission Planning Under Uncertain Generation Investment and Retirement

Transmission planning is typically faced with a wide range of uncertainty including growth in demand, renewable energy generation and fuel price. The restructuring of the electric power industry, the drive for energy independence and the push for a cleaner environment have led to additional sources of uncertainty in all aspects of power system operations and planning. The more decentralized decision-making implicates uncertainty in future generation investment and retirement of existing units. Such uncertainties are among the biggest challenges in transmission planning in power systems. However, existing approaches in the literature do not fully address this problem. In this paper, we construct a new robust transmission planning model representing generation investment and retirement uncertainty more realistically to improve the quantification and visualization of uncertainty and the impacts of environmental policies. With this model, we can manage the impacts of uncertainty in the time, the size and the location of candidate generation additions as well as the retirement of units. The corresponding algorithm we develop takes advantage of the structural characteristics of the model so as to obtain a computationally efficient solution methodology. We present an extensive numerical study on the WECC 240-bus system and illustrate the effectiveness of our approach.