Optimal Transmission Topology for Facilitating the Growth of Renewable Power Generation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how optimal transmission topology control can enhance renewable energy integration by reducing system costs and increasing grid flexibility, especially as renewable penetration grows.

Contribution

It demonstrates the evolving role of optimal topology control in accommodating increasing renewable energy sources and its benefits for system cost reduction.

Findings

Optimal topology variations increase with renewable penetration.

Exploiting transmission flexibility reduces total system costs.

Case studies confirm benefits on RTS-96 network.

Abstract

Transmission topology control is a tool used by system operators in the role of a control action taken into account as a preventive or corrective action relative to a specific outage or set of outages. However, their inclusion in most electricity market frameworks is limited. With the increasing penetration of intermittent energy sources, optimal topology can be used as a lever of flexibility to decrease the total system cost. This paper demonstrates the evolution of optimal topology control on systems with increasing quantities of intermittent renewable energy along two axes. First, the effects of the increased variable sources on the variations of optimal topology are explored. Second, we elaborate on the growing advantages of exploiting transmission level grid flexibility in terms of total system cost. Case studies are performed on a modified RTS-96 network.