Review of Economic Transmission Planning of Overseas Power Market and Its Enlightenment to China

Power market is booming in China right after the 9th order. Conventionally, transmission planning is performed mainly based on purpose of transmission security in a regulated environment. However, when power market takes place, economic planning of transmission system should be carefully designed and considered, since transmission infrastructure could heavily impact the efficiency of the power market, as well as the benefit of all kinds of market participants. Transmission economic planning had been developed in almost all mature power markets overseas. In the paper, such practices in several RTOs/ISOs in United States and TSOs in Europe are investigated. The implementation process, evaluate method and key economic benefit indices of transmission economic planning are summarized in the paper. In the end, based on the current transmission planning and the development of power market in China, the suggestions how transmission economic planning should be performed is given.