The IEEE Reliability Test System: A Proposed 2019 Update

The evolving nature of electricity production, transmission, and consumption necessitates an update to the IEEE's Reliability Test System (RTS), which was last modernized in 1996. The update presented here introduces a generation mix more representative of modern power systems, with the removal of several nuclear and oil-generating units and the addition of natural gas, wind, solar photovoltaics, concentrating solar power, and energy storage. The update includes assigning the test system a geographic location in the southwestern United States to enable the integration of spatio-temporally consistent wind, solar, and load data with forecasts. Additional updates include common RTS transmission modifications in published literature, definitions for reserve product requirements, and market simulation descriptions to enable benchmarking of multi-period power system scheduling problems. The final section presents example results from a production cost modeling simulation on the updated RTS system data.