Sustainability assessment of transmission expansion alternatives

With good transmission infrastructure wind power can be better integrated and conventional power plants can optimize their production share. This brings as a direct consequence a number of sustainability benefits. Sustainability assessment methods are important as they provide valuable information for guiding the decision and policy makers in adopting the right measures for infrastructure development. The main contribution of this paper is devising a methodology for assessing the sustainability improvements that different transmission expansion alternatives could bring to an interconnected power system. The method makes use of unit commitment and economic dispatch simulations for a given development scenario of load and generation, including wind power time series and inter-zonal transmission constraints. Simulations are run for a whole year, and after that, sustainability benefits of interconnection expansion alternatives are computed relative to a base case. The proposed method is applied to a future load and generation scenario for North-Western Europe, including on- and offshore wind power development. The transmission expansion options that would bring the most sustainability benefits to the region are highlighted.