Robust Planning of Transmission Systems: First Results of the Project RobustPlan

The energy transition (“Energiewende“) is characterized by decarbonization, decentralization and digitalization of the energy supply system and leads to profound technical as well as economic changes. For this reason, it is a special chal-lenge for the energy transport sector to identify a robust path of transformation regarding the electrical grid development for multiple decades. To treat a robust path of transformation, the German Transmission System Operators elaborate the Grid Development Plan (“Netzentwicklungsplan”) every two years. Current decisions about investments are expected to be technically as well as economically efficient (“no regret”) in future years and therefore robust against changes in energy policy frameworks, variations in the energy mix as well as developments in technology and politics. In this field, the project RobustPlan focuses on increasing the automation level of transmission expansion planning to be able to compute, quantify and evaluate various scenarios. More precisely, the entire process chain including different functions from preparing the energy system scenarios to the transmission expansion planning and transmission system operation is part of the process chain. The results of the different process chain steps are presented for an energy system scenario for the year 2030 and a grid model including several European countries with several hundred bus bars and individual line representations. The possibility of a multidimensional consideration for the cost retrieved from the trans-mission system operation in the transmission expansion planning and vice versa is provided by the results.