Effect of Hourly Demand Modeling on Generation Planning with Large-Scale Integration of Photovoltaic Plants

The increase in variable generation technologies in electric power systems, imposes great challenges and changes in the methodologies used for planning and operation of these, due to the variability and uncertainty of these resources. One of the challenges is to make maximum use of resources when they are available, this forces the remaining technologies to adapt to these requirements which may imply production reduction, technical minimum operation or detention. The purpose of this work is to develop a mathematical model that allows generation expansion planning with high integration of photovoltaic plants. The problem is solved by transforming the traditional generation expansion-planning model with a load duration curve into one that uses hourly demand profiles that also include solar and wind energy hourly profiles. The proposed model is validated through case studies in a small-scale and large-scale system. The main results obtained indicate that the planning using the load duration curve, oversize the capacity of the park and underestimates the operating costs. The proposed planning model is simple, with low computational cost and allows to estimate with better quality variables such as; investment costs, operation and marginal prices.