Transmission Expansion Planning for Renewable-energy-dominated Power Grids Considering Climate Impact

TL;DR

This paper introduces a systematic transmission expansion planning method tailored for climate-impacted renewable energy grids, incorporating climate-dependent renewable generation, dynamic line ratings, and reliability analysis.

Contribution

It develops an improved TEP model considering climate effects and provides a comprehensive framework for reliability assessment in renewable-dominated grids.

Findings

Climate-aware transmission planning enhances grid reliability.

The proposed model effectively incorporates climate variability.

Reliability varies significantly under different investment scenarios.

Abstract

As renewable energy is becoming the major resource in future grids, the weather and climate can have a higher impact on 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.