Electric Power and Heat Generation Expansion Planning

A short-term electric power and heat generation augmentation planning (EPHGAP) is portrayed and evaluated here. The objective of EPHGAP is to find out the most cost-effective and dependable expansion plan for meeting the forecasted electrical power demand and heat demand over a long-range horizon while fulfilling a large number of technical, cost-effective, reliability, and social constraints. The EPHGAP problem is a big-dimensional highly constrained mixed integer nonlinear programing (MINLP) problem. The general algebraic modeling system (GAMS) environment has been used to implement the proposed formulation, and the EPHGAP problem is solved by using Basic Open-source Nonlinear Mixed Integer (BONMIN) solver. An archetypal test system with existing thermal power plants, cascaded hydropower plants, cogeneration units, heat-only units and candidate cogeneration units, and cascaded hydro plants is considered to evaluate the proposed methodology. Simulation outcomes of the test system have been matched up to those acquired by differential evolution and particle swarm optimization. It has been observed from the comparison that the recommended BONMIN solver has the capability to bestow with superior quality solution.