Optimal Expansion Planning for the Deployment of Wind Energy

With the growing concern regarding climate change, the integration of renewable electric technologies into the grid has taken on increased importance over the past decade. In particular, the integration of wind energy is increasing the attention paid to power transmission investment planning, generation adequacy, and secure system operation. This attention calls for the development of new tools that can simultaneously address the economics, transmission, ancillary services, and reserve requirements associated with wind energy. This paper proposes a method for choosing the optimal plan for expanding transmission and generation considering optimal power flow, discrete plant sizes, and the resource variability of wind energy. The method minimizes total cost, i.e., the sum of the construction cost and the operation cost, to fulfill expected load. Due to the nature of transmission expansion planning and the economies of scale associated with conventional power plants, finding the expansion plan is an integer programming problem solved by a branch and bound method. The proposed method is tested by applying it to a nine-bus system.