As renewable energy is becoming the major resource in future grids, the
weather and climate can have higher impact on the grid reliability.
Transmission expansion planning (TEP) has the potential to reinforce a
transmission network that is suitable for climate-impacted grids. In this
paper, we propose a systematic TEP procedure for climate-impacted renewable
energy-enriched grids. Particularly, this work developed an improved model for
TEP considering climate impact (TEP-CI) and evaluated the system reliability
with the obtained transmission investment plan. Firstly, we created
climate-impacted spatio temporal future grid data to facilitate the TEP-CI
study, which includes the future climate-dependent renewable production as well
as the dynamic rating profiles of the Texas 123-bus backbone transmission
system (TX-123BT). Secondly, we proposed the TEP-CI which considers the
variation in renewable production and dynamic line rating, and obtained the
investment plan for future TX-123BT. Thirdly, we presented a customized
security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC) specifically for climate-impacted
grids. The future grid reliability under various investment scenarios is
analyzed, based on the daily operation conditions from SCUC simulations. The
whole procedure presented in this paper enables numerical studies on grid
planning considering climate-impacts. It can also serve as a benchmark for
other TEP-CI research and performance evaluation.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure