An Integrated Transmission Planning Framework for Including Renewable Energy Technologies in a Deregulated Power System

Renewable energy integration with the power systems will change the power systems in many ways. Renewable resources in remote areas will trigger extensive transmission upgrades to deliver green energy to the load centers. The intermittent and non-dispatchable characteristics of the renewable resources will impact both long-term system adequacy and real-time system security. Uncertainty of the development of renewable resources is another challenge for the transmission planning to avoid over/under investments in the system. The current practices of transmission planning are summarized and compared in this paper. The roles of deterministic and probabilistic reliability assessments and economic assessment techniques in renewable interconnection have been analyzed. A concept of integrated transmission planning framework has been proposed in this paper in order to coordinate different assessment methodologies in renewable energy integration tasks. The proposed integrated transmission planning framework will enable to accelerate the process of transmission planning including renewable energy resources in order to meet the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) target mandated by different states.