Relative cost of fault-tolerant transmission for connecting distributed resources

There exists a need for additional transmission capacity to connect distributed resources such as wind energy from remote locations to the power grid. The high cost of running transmission lines necessitates having a way to minimize the length of transmission required to connect the distributed resources to load centers. In addition, the substations that connect to the transmission lines need to be fault tolerant by ensuring that the loss of any one transmission line does not result in the loss of power to any substation. In this paper, the relative cost of connecting a range of sources to a range of loads with and without fault tolerance is presented. Fault tolerance is achieved through a 2-path redundant graph approach. Studies show that the additional cost of ensuring fault tolerance for selected schemes ranges between 8% and 33%. This percentage value can support decision making in practice.

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