A multi-year transmission planning under a deregulated market

Due to the deregulation of power industry, the transmission expansion plan is different from the process done by the integrated monopolies. In a monopoly electric market, the transmission expansion plan is carried out by the vertically integrated utility. The power company integrates its generations’ exploiting plans and its transmission expansion plans to maintain the system reliability. While in a deregulated power industry, generation, transmission, and distribution companies belong to different owners. The problem becomes more difficult. Generators experiencing transmission constraints can be expected to lobby for new transmission facilities that might relieve their constraints, while generators closer the load centers will likely toward not to build any new transmission facilities that would increase their competition. In order to provide a fair environment for all market participants, this paper proposed a reasonable expansion plan taking the operation cost, load curtailment cost, and investment cost into account. Due to the complexity of this model, the algorithm that combines the genetic algorithm with the linear programming method (GA-LP) is used to solve this problem. The 6-bus system and 24-bus IEEE reliability test system are used to verify the proposed model, and comparisons of test results between the proposed model and the traditional model are also demonstrated in this paper.