Tri-level expansion planning for transmission, energy storage, and renewable energy considering carbon emission limitation

In recent years, renewable energy (RE) has developed rapidly due to its environmentally friendly characteristics. However, RE has strong intermittency and volatility, and a high proportion of RE integration will have a huge impact on power systems. Moreover, some power systems also put forward requirements for RE utilization, which requires more flexible resources. Conventional units are limited in development under the carbon emission reduction policies. The energy storage system (ESS) can stabilize the volatility of RE power and alleviate transmission congestion. Therefore, to promote the energy transformation of power systems, it is necessary to jointly consider transmission network, ESS, and RE in power system planning. Considering that the planning decision-makers are different, this paper proposes a tri-level expansion planning model considering carbon emission limitation and RE development. In the upper-level (UL) problem, the transmission system operator constructs transmission lines and grid-side ESS to ensure load supply and carbon emission requirements. On the premise that the RE curtailment rate is within a certain range, the middle-level (ML) problem constructs RE units to maximize the RE installed capacity. Based on the construction results of the UL and ML problems, lower-level (LL) problems simulate economic dispatching from the perspective of the independent system operator. To solve the tri-level model, an equivalent bi-level model is transformed according to strong duality theory, and then the column and constraint generation (C&CG) algorithm is adopted to solve the bi-level problem. In case studies, the numerical results analyze the impacts of carbon emissions, RE curtailment rate, and ESS parameters on the planning results, which verifies the rationality of the approach proposed in this paper. (c) 2023 The Author(s).