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This paper describes an approach to address the generation expansion-planning problem in order to help generation companies to decide whether to invest on new assets. This approach was developed in the scope of the implementation of electricity markets that eliminated the traditional centralized planning and lead to the creation of several generation companies competing for the delivery of power. As a result, this activity is more risky than in the past and so it is important to develop decision support tools to help generation companies to adequately analyse the available investment options in view of the possible behavior of other competitors. The developed model aims at maximizing the expected revenues of a generation company while ensuring the safe operation of the power system and incorporating uncertainties related with price volatility, with the reliability of generation units, with the demand evolution and with investment and operation costs. These uncertainties are modeled by pdf functions and the solution approach is based on Genetic Algorithms. Finally, the paper includes a Case Study to illustrate the application and interest of the developed approach.

This paper describes a long term generation expansion model that uses system dynamics to capture the interrelations between different variables and parameters. Using this model, it is possible to estimate the long term evolution of the demand and of the electricity price that are then used by generation agents to prepare individual expansion plans. These plans are submitted to a coordination analysis to check some global indicators, as the reserve margin and the LOLE. The developed approach is illustrated using a realistic generation system based on the Portuguese/Spanish system with an installed capacity of nearly 120 GW and an yearly demand of 312 TWh in 2010. Large investments were directed in the last 20 years to the Iberian generation system both regarding traditional technologies and dispersed generation (namely wind parks and solar systems). Today, the excess of installed capacity together with the demand reduction poses a number of questions that should be addressed carefully namely to investigate the impact of several options. The planning exercise aims at identifying the most adequate expansion plans in view of the increased renewable generation (namely wind parks). For illustration purposes, we also conducted a sensitivity analysis to evaluate the impact of increasing the installed capacity in wind parks, of internalizing CO2 emission costs and of incorporating a capacity payment. These analyses are relevant in order to get more insight on the possible long term evolution of the system and to allow generation companies to take more sounded decisions.

This paper addresses the generation expansionplanning problem describing a model that generation companies and regulators can use to get insight to this problem and to more completely study and characterize different investment decisions. The simulation model considers a number of possible generation technologies and aims at characterizing the corresponding investment plans from an economic point of view having in mind that market prices, the demand growth, investment and operation costs, as well as other factors, are affected by uncertainties. With the objective of helping generation companies and regulators to carry out this planning, we adopted an approach based on System Dynamics. This methodology allows simulating the long-term behavior of electricity markets, namely to help getting insight into the way new generation capacity enters in the market in a liberalized framework. Finally, the paper presents results from a case study illustrating the use of this approach.

The Iberian power systems went through important changes at the legal, regulatory and organizational levels in the last 20 years. One of the most relevant ones was the increasing penetration of distributed generation, namely wind parks, together with the development of the common market involving Portugal and Spain. In Portugal, distributed generation is paid using feed in tariffs while in Spain it can choose between receiving a regulated feed in tariff or the market price plus a participation prize. The feed in scheme is now under discussion since it is argued that it represents an excessive cost that is internalized in the end user tariffs. However, this discussion is frequently conducted without complete knowledge of the real impact of wind power on the electricity market price, since it contributes to reduce the demand on the market thus inducing a price reduction. To clarify these issues we used a long term System Dynamics based model already reported in a previous publication to estimate the long term evolution of the market price. This model was applied to the Iberian generation system using different shares of wind power capacity to quantify the impact of wind power on the day-ahead electricity market price.

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The energy sector is evolving rapidly, namely due to the increasing importance of renewable energy sources. The connection of large amounts of wind power generation poses new challenges for the dynamic voltage stability analysis of an electric power system, which has to be studied. In this paper, the traditional Doubly-Fed Induction Generator model is employed. Based on this model, a crowbar and chopper circuit is set up to protect the turbine during the short-circuit period. The EUROSTAG software package was used for the simulation studies of the system, and numerical results were obtained. Conclusions are drawn that provide a better understanding of the influence of crowbar and chopper protection on Doubly-Fed Induction Generators (DFIG), during low voltage ride through, in a system with wind power generation.

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