Generation and transmission expansion planning with high penetration of wind farms considering spatial distribution of wind speed

This paper represents the effect of wind speed's spatial distribution on the simultaneous generation and transmission expansion planning of power systems including wind farms. To this end, wind farm's capacity factor is used as a practical parameter to model its output power. It is shown that ignoring wind speed's spatial distribution affects the expected exploitable wind power. In other words, the utilizable wind power of a wind farm in a power system would be overestimated if the spatial distribution of the wind speed is not considered and the wind farm's owner expects more utilizable wind power than what happens in the real world. The objective function of the proposed mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is to minimize total cost which includes three main parts: 1. The total investment cost of thermal generation units, transmission lines, and wind farms, 2. Expected operation cost of thermal generators, which is related to fuel consumption and penalty of the CO2 emission, and 3. Expected loss cost of transmission lines. Furthermore, it is investigated that how different values of operation cost, as well as CO2 emission tax, affect the proposed expansion planning model. Two test systems, namely IEEE 24-bus RTS and IEEE 118-bus test systems, are employed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that ignoring wind speed's spatial distribution not only changes the optimal plan but also makes the planner expect a further reduction in the value of objective function. This outcome is particularly true for high values of operation cost and emission taxes of greenhouse gases as well as high wind power penetration levels.