Enhancing Generation Expansion Planning With Integration of Variable Renewable Energy and Full-Year Hourly Multiple Load Levels Balance Constraints

This paper proposes a method for generation expansion planning that incorporates full-year hourly multiple load levels balance constraints, providing sufficient flexibility to address load fluctuations and intermittency associated with variable renewable energy sources. Typically, ensuring that the generation system possesses enough flexibility to manage this intermittency involves considering the operational characteristics of generators within unit commitment constraints. However, to mitigate the substantial computational burden caused by the number and type of variables, various approximation techniques are often employed. Unfortunately, these techniques can introduce unrealistic elements into the problem. Instead of considering the operational characteristics of generators, this approach classifies the system’s demand into three levels: base load, intermediate load, and peak load, using the proposed load classification method. The multiple load-level balance constraints are then applied to ensure that the capacity of generation units in each level is sufficient to meet their corresponding demand, with particular emphasis on matching fast-response generation units and their corresponding demand. The resulting generation expansion plan can be obtained with significantly reduced computational effort. The proposed load classification method and generation expansion planning approach have been tested using the latest power development plan of Thailand. Compared to another method that is not taken flexibility into account, 5 Gigawatts of fast-response generation capacity are selected instead of base load generation units. With the improved computational time achieved by the proposed generation expansion planning method, it can account for input data uncertainty by solving multiple generation expansion planning problems with varying input data and distinct individual probabilities.