Optimal electric power generation planning with environmental constraints

Energy use in the developing world has been growing rapidly over recent decades relative to the growth in industrialized countries albeit from a low base. In the next century electricity consumption is expected to continue to rise with striking rapidity because of population growth and income growth. In the mean time, more technical, economical and environmental considerations are being imposed on electric utilities that they can no longer encourage and serve uncontrolled growth. Thus the requirement for a planning methodology that satisfies the above conflicting objectives become a mandate. This thesis describes the development of a computer program for generation system planning based on reliability and production costing algorithms. In this work, an environmental emission model has been integrated to a probabilistic production-costing model that uses the loss of energy method. The new model can calculate the expected energy produced and the associated expected costs. It also computes the allowed and the actual emissions and deduces the associated cleaning costs. Finally, the expansion planning model proposes several expansion plans that determine both the timing of generation addition with the required capacity and the generation mix, so that the future load can be at minimum operating costs, minimum cleaning costs, and maximum reliability. This optimizing model uses dynamic programming which has proven its strength over methods in respect of modeling the inherent and significant non-linearity of this problem. The technique used to make the connection between the three conflicting objectives is based on multi-objective optimization following a weighting method. In order to reflect the relative importance of the various objectives, the analytical hierarchy process is used to determine the corresponding weights. This method represents a screening process to minimize the proposed plans. Moreover the trade-off method is used as it includes the tools for both evaluating the trade-off among conflict objectives and identifying plans which represent good compromises. Simulations are then presented on the Lebanese Electric Power System in both operation and expansion planning. Finally, the thesis concludes on the results of the efficacy of the developed program and presents some recommendations concerning the Lebanese system. (author)