A New Decision-Making Strategy for Techno-Economic Assessment of Generation and Transmission Expansion Planning for Modern Power Systems.

Planning for the intensive use of renewable energy sources (RESs) has attracted wide attention to limit global warming and meet future load growth. Existing studies have shown that installing projects such as transmission lines, energy storage systems (ESSs), fault current limiters, and FACTs facilitate the integration of RESs into power systems. Different generation and transmission network expansion planning models have been developed in the literature; however, a planning model that manages multiple types of projects while maximizing the hosting capacity (HC) is not widely presented. In this paper, a novel planning framework is proposed to enhance and control the HC level of RESs by comparing various kinds of renewables, ESSs, fault current limiters, and FACTs to choose the right one, economically and technically. The proposed problem is formulated as a challenging mixed-integer non-linear optimization problem. To solve it, a solution methodology based on a developed decision-making approach and an improved meta-heuristic algorithm is developed. The decision-making approach aims to keep the number of decision variables as fixed as possible, regardless of the number of projects planned. While an improved war strategy optimizer that relies on the Runge-Kutta learning strategy is applied to strengthen the global search ability. The proposed decision-making approach depends primarily on grouping candidate projects that directly impact the same system state into four separate planning schemes. The first scheme relies on the impedance of devices installed in any path to optimally identify the location and size of the new circuits and the series-type FACTs. The second scheme is based on optimally determining the suitable types of ESSs. On the other hand, the third scheme optimizes the reactive power dispatched from the ESSs and shunt-type FACTs simultaneously. The fourth scheme is concerned with regulating the power dispatched from different types of RESs. All of the simulations, which were carried out on the Garver network and the 118-bus system, demonstrated the ability of the investigated model to select the appropriate projects precisely. Further, the results proved the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed method in obtaining high-quality solutions in fewer runs compared to the conventional method.