A Review of Challenges for Security-Constrained Transmission Expansion Planning

Abstract

The increasing demand and the corresponding rising penetration of renewable energy generation has brought various challenges for the power system. In this regard, expansion planning of the system is exceedingly significant. Commonly, power system expansion is categorized into generation, transmission, and distribution domains. As the investment involved in transmission expansion planning (TEP) is usually greater than the other two domains, thus, this paper focuses on TEP. The main aim of TEP is to install new devices on a transmission grid to optimize a variable, based on an objective function, while fulfilling some pre-defined technical and economic constraints. The non-linear and non-convex nature of TEP, along with system uncertainties (load, renewable generation, etc.) makes it a stimulating issue. Moreover, the combinatorial explosion of investment replacements, bundled with (N-1) security constraints, generally necessitates a huge computational effort to solve it. The security-constrained transmission expansion planning (SCTEP) has various challenges. Thus, the main objective of this research is to review and present some challenges associated with SCTEP problem.