Power System Planning
Advanced survey of long-range electric-system planning and the dynamic-security questions that shape investment decisions. The course integrates generation, transmission, and strategic planning with cascading-blackout risk, demand-side management, and transient-stability analysis.
Objectives
- Evaluate generation-expansion alternatives using capacity, forced-outage, reserve, and reliability considerations.
- Apply reliability criteria and contingency analysis to transmission-planning needs and alternatives.
- Use multi-attribute, uncertainty, dominance, and robustness concepts in strategic planning.
- Explain how overloads, protection actions, voltage decline, and operator response contribute to cascading blackouts.
- Describe demand-side-management objectives, program selection, load-shape changes, and cost-benefit evaluation.
- Relate demand response, energy efficiency, storage, communications, and smart-grid technologies to system planning.
- Formulate transient-stability studies using coupled differential and algebraic equations.
- Analyze generator synchronism, fault clearing, exciters, governors, and large-system simulation results.
Modules
Description: Introduces generation-expansion planning through demand forecasts, unit size and mix, forced-outage rates, reserve margins, loss-of-load probability, capacity adequacy, and the tradeoffs among reliability, cost, risk, and construction lead time.
Description: Develops the transmission-planning process using forecast operating conditions, NERC reliability criteria, normal and contingency performance, power-flow studies, reinforcement needs, environmental and cost considerations, and comparison of wires and non-wires alternatives.
Description: Examines planning under multiple objectives and uncertain futures. It introduces scenario construction, multi-attribute comparisons, dominance and tradeoff surfaces, expected value, risk, robustness, and the selection of plans that remain acceptable across plausible futures.
Description: Explores how stressed conditions, outages, hidden failures, relay operations, voltage decline, and operator decisions can propagate into widespread interruptions. It connects contingency sensitivity and post-outage flows with preventive and corrective actions that contain a disturbance.
Description: Defines demand-side management as deliberate utility and customer action on the customer side of the meter. It introduces integrated planning, program identification and selection, customer needs, utility and societal perspectives, and cost-benefit evaluation.
Description: Develops load-shape objectives including peak clipping, valley filling, load shifting, strategic conservation, strategic load growth, and flexible load shape. It reviews storage, interruptible loads, price signals, and program approaches used to reshape demand.
Description: Connects demand-side programs to competitive wholesale markets, demand response, critical-peak conditions, customer participation, measurement of savings, and the combined role of energy efficiency and responsive demand in meeting system needs.
Description: Examines smart-grid communications and customer energy-management systems, dynamic prices, automated building response, thermal storage, and practical programs that reduce peak demand while preserving useful customer services.
Description: Reviews interruption and reliability indices, the scale and cost of blackouts, major-event reporting, large-disturbance mechanisms, and lessons from historical events. It distinguishes routine distribution interruptions from rare, high-impact transmission-system blackouts.
Description: Introduces transient stability as the seconds-scale dynamic response to major disturbances. It contrasts power-flow and dynamic models, formulates coupled differential and algebraic equations, reviews power-system time scales, and defines the generator-synchronism, voltage, and frequency questions addressed by stability studies.
Description: Works through a single-machine infinite-bus disturbance, including pre-fault initialization, the swing equation, fault-on and post-fault network conditions, numerical integration, rotor-angle response, and the influence of fault-clearing time on stability.
Description: Extends the formulation to large systems with network power-balance equations, many generators, and multiple dynamic models. It introduces exciters, governors, block-diagram models, initialization, explicit integration, and practical simulation workflows.