Power network planning considering trade-off between cost, risk, and reliability

Over the past few years, the penetration of renewable distributed generation (DG) into power systems has increased markedly. Given the intermittency and uncertainty of renewables, demand response (DR) resources play an important role in balancing power supply-demand and shaving peak demand. In order to evaluate the system performance under contingencies, a risk factor is explicitly defined in this paper. This risk factor realistically considers the cost and the feasibility of corrective control (CC) actions. This risk factor is incorporated into our multi-objective transmission expansion planning (TEP) framework, which handles conflicting objectives of cost, risk, and reliability. The proposed model is numerically verified on the modified IEEE 118-bus and IEEE 24-bus RTS systems. Comparative studies with simplified versions of TEP models have also been undertaken. To sum up, the proposed approach should be considered as a risk-based, decision support tool, providing system operators or network planners with opportunities to make tradeoffs between cost, risk and reliability.