Transmission expansion planning in electricity market: The case in Vietnam

In the last decades, the trend in restructuring of electricity sector in many countries has resulted in a need of developing new methods for the Transmission Extension Planning (TEP) to deal with new uncertainties from the market. Vietnamese Electricity Supplying Industry also is being unbundled and striking to start their Competitive Generation Market in next year. An open-access transmission system is required as a requisite of market development, which will make some changes in the traditional process of TEP in Vietnam. Therefore, a new TEP method is needed to deal with these challenges, such as an increase in amount of transactions on the network and uncertainties from both suppliers and consumers' sides. This paper proposed an applicable method for solving TEP problem with the case of Vietnamese power transmission network. The TEP problem in Vietnamese context is conducted with the proposed TEP procedure using the selected optimization techniques (Particle Swarm Optimization - PSO). A comparative study for TEP solutions based on Adaptive PSO and Constriction factor PSO is also presented.