Towards planning for flexible future grids under high power injection diversity

Abstract

Power injection patterns will become more diverse in the future as more intermittent generation, bulk energy storage, and aggregated flexible loads become integrated into the grid. Designing flexible and, in a way, dispatchable grids is an emerging area of research to accommodate the increased dispatch diversity from the supply- and demand-sides. This work presents an approach that reduces total grid inadequacy for power injection diversity by combining the benefits of (1) reduced inherent grid inadequacy via grid expansion and (2) additional grid flexibility via line switching. Unlike most models that minimize cost under uncertainty, the proposed approach directly minimizes total grid inadequacy using the size of a scenario-based representation of the power flow infeasible set to find meritorious line and switch installation options. Experiments using the 6- and 118-bus test systems show reduced total grid inadequacy, especially when both solutions are considered simultaneously. We hope that this work can inspire future work on integrating grid flexibility in expansion planning.