Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London
Doi
Abstract
Maintaining security and reliability in the electricity supply is fundamental to the functioning
of a modern society and drives the need for adequate transmission capacity for both market
participants and customers. Planning the investment in transmission has always been a
complicated undertaking due to the high development costs and long lead times. Furthermore,
to anticipate the future needs of customers is a task as difficult as that of cost-effective
planning and construction of new facilities. Trying to find treatments for some of these issues
represents a major motivation for this thesis.
This thesis investigates the problem of how much reinforcement a transmission system
requires when a significant proportion of wind generation is integrated into an existing
transmission system. A multi-period transmission planning model is developed for
determining optimal transmission capacity by balancing amortised transmission investment
costs and annual generation costs subject to network security constraints, The model employs
the security-constrained DC optimal power flow formulation and applies a solver
(DashXpress) to obtain the results of the remaining linear large-scale optimisation problem.
This thesis begins by exploring the impact of wind generation on the determination of
appropriate levels of system capacity on the transmission network starting from the premise
that it is no longer cost effective to invest in sufficient network capacity to accommodate
simultaneous peaks from all generators. As such, a significant finding of this study is that
conventional and wind generation should share network capacity. Given the acknowledged
increase in uncertainty to security of supply due to difficulties in wind generation forecast this
thesis also explores the optimal sourcing of generation reserve, and investigates investment in
transmission capacity to exploit the cost benefits offered by standing reserve.
Finally, the thesis presents and evaluates an alternative associated with transmission operation
and investment level of risk and uncertainty by introducing more flexibility to the way the
transmission system is operated. Application of Quadrature Boosters and Demand Side as
model of corrective control, brings savings in operating costs without jeopardizing the level of
system security, enables better utilisation of existing facilities and reduces the demand for
new transmission investment
