Network Reduction for Power System Planning: Zone Identification

Network reduction is useful in addressing the computational intensity of expansion planning methods. In this paper, a network reduction method is proposed to reduce system size while preserving important power flows. The focus of this study is on two aspects of the proposed method, namely, zone identification and generation bus aggregation. For zone identification, a minimum spanning tree algorithm is used, and its performance on the IEEE 118 case is compared with another method published in the literature called multi-cut. The remaining steps in the reduction method will be addressed in future work.