An Engineering-Economic Approach to Transmission Planning Under Market and Regulatory Uncertainties: WECC Case Study

We propose a stochastic programming-based tool to support adaptive transmission planning under market and regulatory uncertainties. We model investments in two stages, differentiating between commitments that must be made now and corrective actions that can be undertaken as new information becomes available. The objective is to minimize expected transmission and generation costs over the time horizon. Nonlinear constraints resulting from Kirchhoff's voltage law are included. We apply the tool to a 240-bus representation of the Western Electricity Coordinating Council and model uncertainty using three scenarios with distinct renewable electricity mandates, emissions policies, and fossil fuel prices. We conclude that the cost of ignoring uncertainty (the cost of using naive deterministic planning methods relative to explicitly modeling uncertainty) is of the same order of magnitude as the cost of first-stage transmission investments. Furthermore, we conclude that heuristic rules for constructing transmission plans based on scenario planning can be as suboptimal as deterministic plans.