A Long-term Capacity Expansion Planning Model for an Electric Power System Integrating Large-size Renewable Energy Technologies

The recent interest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions has facilitated the integration of renewable energy technologies (RETs) into the electricity sector around the world. Despite the fact that renewable energy provides substantial benefits for climate and economy, the large size deployment of RETs could possibly hurt the level of power system reliability because of their technical limitations, intermittency and non-dispatchability. Many power system planners and operators consider this to be a critical problem. This paper proposes a possible solution to this problem through the design of a new stochastic optimization model for the long-term capacity expansion planning of a power system that explicitly incorporated the uncertainty associated with RETs, and developed its solution by using the sample average approximation method. A numerical analysis followed to emphasize the effects of the large scale integration of RETs on not only an example at the power systems reliability level but also, consequentially, its long-term capacity expansion planning. From the results of the numerical analysis, we can show that our proposed model can develop a long-term capacity expansion plan that is more robust with respect to the uncertain RETs and is able to quantify how much capacity the system requires to be reliable.1