EPNES: Pricing Transmission Congestion to Alleviate System Stability Constraints in Bulk Power Planning

Auburn University, Auburn AL

Investigators

Abstract

Transmission of electric power is the ability to move large volumes of energy from where it is generated to where is needed. Even though the quantity of power traded in the wholesale market in the United States went from almost nothing in 1994 to over 800 terrawatthours in 2000, there has been relatively little money put into the transmission system. Consequently, the transmission infrastructure is aged, resulting in "congested lines" such as increased instances of constrained systems, reduced import capability, heavily loaded lines, and stability problems. Therefore, any effort to reduce transmission congestion may provide substantial benefits in customer choice and economic efficiency in power operation. A popular type of congestion-management pricing is known as locational marginal pricing (LMP). Although LMP should be an effective long-term strategy, there has not been a concerted effort to use LMP to alleviate stability concerns. The intellectual merit of this project lies in extending the LMP concept to include stability-limited regions of bulk power systems. The proposed work will focus on defining the stability constraints based on the underlying physics of power systems, the inclusion of these constraints into suitable optimization models, and the evaluation of the economic implications produced by such optimizations. One of the most significant broader impacts anticipated is the use of actual bulk-power system data provided by Southern Company. The results based on this data will permit more realistic steady-state and dynamic studies of large interconnected power systems, which will be a major contribution to the power engineering research community.