| This thesis addresses several issues in transmission planning and investment in the restructured electricity industry. In particular, the thesis exploits topological structures common in actual power networks to highlight some problems with market-based transmission planning.; The topological analysis of the power grid focuses on identifying and analyzing Wheatstone structures embedded in larger systems. In other networks (such as water or gas pipes, the internet, and even crowd control), the Wheatstone network is associated with the Braess Paradox, a phenomenon where adding links to a network increases congestion throughout the network. This thesis provides the first quantitative analysis of how the presence of a Wheatstone structure can affect the flow of power through electric networks, and develops a fast heuristic algorithm to identify embedded Wheatstone structures, which are quite common in real networks.; Wheatstone networks can cause congestion, but they may be justified on the grounds that they increase the reliability of the network, helping to reduce the frequency of blackouts. Models of market-based transmission investment labor under the assumption that congestion and reliability are independent attributes in power networks. New transmission links can be justified as providing either a reliability benefit or an economic (congestion-relief) benefit. The cost of investments made for reliability should be socialized, while market incentives will provide for economic investments. This thesis provides the first quantitative assessment of the claim that reliability and congestion are independent. The thesis develops metrics to decompose a line's reliability benefit from its impact on network congestion, and applies these metrics to four embedded Wheatstone sub-networks in the IEEE 118-bus test system. While it is possible to account separately for a transmission line's effect on system reliability and congestion, the two are almost never independent quantities. Further, the benefit of a particular transmission line to the network varies highly with the level of demand and the topological state of the rest of the system. |
