A Literary Framework for Coordinated Planning of Generation Transmission and Distribution

Power system planning must be prepared to match the growing percentage of intermittent renewable energy sources and current demand for electrical energy. The problem of deciding new generation resources and transmission lines that should be added to an existing power network in order to satisfy the growing demand efficiently, is one of the main strategic decisions in power systems and has a serious impact on the stability of the system. The traditional impact factor such as load variability, demand growth and electricity market prices plus the recent developments in power network, such as renewable distributed generations, demand side management and reserve availability have increased considerably the complexity of this problem. For the last several decades, a vast array of research works that deal with the different theoretical and practical aspects of the problem. This paper firstly gives a complete overview of coordinated power system planning considering source-source, source-network, source-load, source-network-load and source-storge respectively. According to the different aspects of integrated network planning, it proposes a taxonomy of solution methods for the coordinated planning problem. Moreover, not only traditional approaches, but also those involving uncertainties in generation and demand, reliability assessment, electricity markets, and energy storage are highlighted to establish a complete background. This is followed by a discussion of additional challenges and their solutions in the context of coordinated network planning. These alternatives are critically compared, providing with insights that can guide researchers or practitioners when undertaking this kind of studies.