Study On Renewable Energy Integrated Generation Expansion Planning Problem

Generation expansion planning (GEP) problem involves determining new power plants in terms of type, capacity and allocation so that load demands are met over the planning horizon meeting all technical and environmental constraints. The GEP problem incorporates a large number of constraints and it is a highly complex, large scale, non linear optimization problem.Renewable energy systems (RES) are of vital importance to meet the world’s energy demands. Ample amount of work has been done in past to integrate large amount of RES in the Generation expansion planning process but the result of all these studies indicate that renewable generation technologies cannot compete with the traditional en-ergy sources only if economic aspects are taken into consideration.In this research a driving factor for the promotion of RES i.e. External cost of energy has been considered in the planning process. A chance constrained model consid-ering the external cost of energy has been proposed to deal with the uncertainties associ-ated with the RES and Evolutionary based GA is used to solve the model. The model is implemented in MATLAB and applied to a case that lies in the west of China. The results endorse the fact that external cost of energy can be used as a key driving factor for large scale integration of RES.