Generation expansion planning considering reliability of the system: A review on various optimization techniques

The ever increasing demand for electrical energy is posing a big challenge to the power system engineers to maintain the balance between supply and demand as well as to take care of environmental and economical issues. The emission of CO2 from the fossil fuel power plants is the key pollutant that is causing a major threat to the environment. So the conventional power plants are required to incorporate with carbon capture and storage (CCS) systems, and this increases the capital cost of the power plants. Hence it becomes a big decision for the investors in the electricity generation sector to make either to invest in construction of fossil fuel-fired plants with CCS or in the units that are free from pollutants such as nuclear and renewable energy systems. This decision making can be mathematically expressed all the way through generation expansion planning (GEP) problem. Due to its large-scale, long-term, non-linear, and discrete nature of generation unit size, GEP becomes a very challenging task. To improve the power system reliability with efficient economic operation, Energy storage systems (ESSs) has been a very effective means of obtaining this objective, whereby based on technology employed the energy is stored in a certain form and is transformed to electrical energy when desired. The day by day increase in the use of renewable energy sources to generate electrical energy poses both expansion and operational challenges. This paper presents an insight review of various aspects related to the expansion of the electrical power system such as GEP and renewable energy technologies (RETs) to maintain supply demand balance besides satisfying reliability criteria as well and various optimization techniques adopted to obtain the solution of the objective function.