A study of robust generation mix under uncertain environments

In recent years, the trend has been toward factors (e.g., demand for load, energy cost) becoming more and more uncertain in power system expansion planning. Thus, it has become necessary to take this uncertainty into account in determining generation plans. In this paper, a robust generation plan is defined explicitly as a plan that ensures fixed performance (economy) despite deviations in these factors. In addition, a new formulation of the robust generation mix problem, whose purpose is to determine the most robust combination of plants in a target year, is proposed. It is generally difficult to solve the formulated problem with parameters. However, by analyzing a proposed formulation from the viewpoint of optimization, we show that the proposed formulation is transformed into the conventional optimization problem without parameters. The simulation results on a typical model show that the generation mix produced by the proposed formulation is more robust than that produced by the conventional formulation. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 141(1): 26–35, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/eej.2009