An ambiguity averse approach for transmission expansion planning

Transmission expansion planning (TEP) plays an important role in the integration of renewable energy sources (RES). In fact, the standards of expansion plans have significantly changed due to the speedily increase renewable penetration. In addition, stronger security requirements have been imposed in order to avoid blackouts associated with outages of system elements. In this paper, we propose a methodology to devise the optimal expansion plan while taking into account the possibility of system failures and uncertainty in renewable output. Since the uncertainty characterization of RES output still represents a challenge for operators and planners, the methodology proposed is general enough to accommodate a set of eligible RES probability distributions. Structurally, the proposed TEP formulation is a particular instance of the risk-constrained adjustable robust optimization (R-ARO) framework, modelled as a (hierarchical) three-level system of optimization problems. An IEEE-based test system is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the TEP model.