Generation and Transmission Expansion Planning for Renewable Energy Integration

In recent years the expansion planning prob-lem has become increasingly complex. As expan-sion planning (sometimes called composite or inte-grated resource planning) is a non-linear and non-convex optimization problem, researchers have traditionally focused on approximate models of power flows to solve the problem. The prob-lem has also been split into generation expansion planning (GEP) and transmission network expan-sion planning (TNEP) to improve computational tractability. Until recently these approximations have produced results that are straight-forward to combine and adapt to the more complex and com-plete problem. However, the power grid is evolv-ing towards a state where the adaptations are no longer easy (e.g. large amounts of limited con-trol, renewable generation, comparable generation and transmission construction costs) and necessi-tates new approaches. Recent work on determin-istic Discrepancy Bounded Local Search (DBLS) has shown it to be quite effective in addressing the TNEP. In this paper, we propose a generalization of DBLS to handle simultaneous generation and transmission planning