Network planning in unbundled power systems

In this paper, a new approach for network planning in unbundled power systems is presented. The approach takes into account the desires of demand customers, power producers, system operator, network owner(s), and regulator in network planning. Competition, reliability, flexibility of operation, transmission expansion cost, and environmental impacts are used as planning criteria. In order to consider the importance degrees of stakeholders and planning criteria in network planning, first importance degrees of stakeholders and planning criteria are determined by a presented new method. Then, importance degrees of stakeholders and planning criteria are aggregated with appropriateness degrees of expansion plans to compute a fuzzy index for measuring the goodness of expansion plans. The final plan is selected using the presented fuzzy risk assessment method. The approach is applied to an eight-bus test system.