Grid inadequacy assessment for high power injection diversity Part II: Finding grid expansion options

Abstract

Power injection scenarios will become more diverse in the future as intermittent renewable generation, dynamic loads, and energy storage devices become more prevalent especially under a market environment. Grid planners need new planning tools to find long-term grid expansion options that promote competition and equitable market access by accommodating diverse scenarios. Part I of the paper presented a framework and a set of metrics for measuring inherent grid inadequacy for high power injection diversity using the power flow infeasible set. This paper uses the ideas in Part I to develop an approach that finds grid expansion options by directly minimizing inherent grid inadequacy as objective. We present one implementation using a robust-like optimization model that minimizes the size of a scenario-based representation of the power flow infeasible set. We show using case studies that the proposed approach using inherent grid inadequacy metrics can identify solutions distinct from other approaches and better in some measure.