Transmission Network Expansion Planning Considering Renewable Energy Target with Taguchi's Orthogonal Array Testing

Nowadays, renewable energy resources are becoming more and more popular. The intermittent nature of renewable energy sources will affect transmission network expansion planning (TNEP). Consequently, this paper presents a new problem formulation and solution procedure for TNEP which can cope with the intermittent characteristics. Taguchi's orthogonal array testing (TOAT) is used to select the scenarios that represent the loads and renewable energy resource uncertainties. In this paper, a new index called the renewable energy leak' (REL) is proposed to evaluate the unutilized or leaked' renewable energy in the TNEP. For minimizing the investment cost of transmission network expansion, annual generator operation cost, and annual transmission line loss cost, the meta-heuristic adaptive Tabu search (ATS) algorithm is used, while the system operating limits including the REL index are taken into account as the optimization constraints. The proposed procedure is tested in a modified IEEE Reliability Test System 79. The results show that the proposed method is efficient and promising. (c) 2014 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.