Data-Driven Representative Day Selection for Investment Decisions: A Cost-Oriented Approach

Power system investment planning problems become intractable due to the vast variability that characterizes system operation and the increasing complexity of the optimization model to capture the characteristics of renewable energy sources. In this context, making optimal investment decisions by considering every operating period is unrealistic and inefficient. The conventional solution to address this computational issue is to select a limited number of representative operating periods by clustering the input demand-generation patterns while preserving the key statistical features of the original population. However, for an investment model that contains highly complex non-linear relationship between input data and optimal investment decisions, selecting representative periods by relying on only input data becomes inefficient. This paper proposes a novel investment cost-oriented representative day selection framework for large scale multi-spacial investment problems, which performs clustering directly based on the investment decisions for each generation technology at each location associated with each individual day. Additionally, dimensionality reduction is performed to ensure that the proposed method is feasible for large-scale power systems and high-resolution input data. The superior performance of the proposed method is demonstrated through a series of case studies with different levels of modeling complexity.