A framework for the analysis of transmission planning in the market environment

The need for investment in the improvement and expansion of the grid and for maintaining the existing network has not been met in the competitive environment. Under the new paradigm, the economic signals resulting from the daily markets, such as locational marginal prices, congestion metrics and others, need to be explicitly considered together with the economics of investment in new assets. This paper presents a framework for the analysis of issues in the planning and investment of transmission in the competitive environment. We construct the framework as an extension of a framework developed for congestion analysis by adding a new layer for transmission expansion/investment issues. This extension requires the development of appropriate metrics to allow the evaluation of measures needed for the planning horizon. The principal notion is to evaluate the relevant metrics with and without the transmission asset investment(s). We apply the framework to investigate transmission expansion scenarios from the Independent Grid Operator (IGO) point of view. We present representative results to illustrate the capability of the decision support framework that we propose.