Transmission network expansion planning under deliberate outages

The reasons why the transmission network is a potentially attractive target for deliberate outages are twofold: (i) its crucial importance as a critical infrastructure for the society welfare, and (ii) its high level of vulnerability due to the current operation close to its static and dynamic limits. This new context where destructive agents come into play has been recognized by several agencies in Europe and North America, and various initiatives have been launched worldwide in order to assess and mitigate the vulnerability of transmission. Within this framework, this paper proposes the reinforcement and expansion of the transmission network as a way of mitigating the impact of increasingly plausible deliberate outages. The network planner selects the new lines to be built accounting not only for economic issues, as traditionally done, but also for the vulnerability of the transmission network against a set of credible intentional outages. The resulting vulnerability- and economic-constrained transmission expansion planning problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear program. A number of case studies numerically illustrate the tradeoff between economic- and vulnerability-related issues and its impact on the expansion plans. In addition, we compare the results with those achieved by a traditional expansion planning model based on cost minimization. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.