Robust Transmission Expansion Planning Representing Long- and Short-Term Uncertainty

This paper addresses the transmission expansion planning problem under long- and short-term uncertainty. Long-term uncertainty pertains to changes across years (demand growth and future increase in production capacity), whereas short-term uncertainty pertains to changes within a year (demand and wind/solar power production variability, and equipment availability). This expansion problem is formulated as an adaptive robust optimization problem that provides protection against long-term uncertainty while carefully representing short-term uncertainty via scenarios. The problem is solved via a tailored implementation of the primal Benders’ decomposition algorithm that focuses on an efficient solution of the subproblem. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm to identify robust expansion plans and its computational efficiency are illustrated through a realistic case study.