Advances in Computational Methods and Technologies for Power System Planning

Today's power system has been facing more risks than ever from increasing renewable power generation, fuel deliverability, natural disasters such as wildfires and hurricanes, cyber-attacks, and so forth. The integration of large amounts of small-scale distributed energy resources (DERs) such as rooftop photovoltaics (PVs) and electric vehicles (EVs) further complicates the modeling and operation of the electric power grid. Moreover, the energy policies on renewable portfolio, emissions, and DERs demand for advances in operation and planning practices of the power industry. In this increasingly dynamic, complex and uncertain power grid, the power system planning plays a critical role in ensuring the resource adequacy of the system to deliver reliable, clean and economic electric power to the consumers. To address these new challenges in the power system planning, the modeling of the power system becomes much more complex and the integration of new components with spatial-temporal correlations significantly increase the dimension of the planning problem. Advanced mathematical modeling approaches, optimization and artificial-intelligence algorithms, computation technologies and platforms such as quantum and cloud computing, are needed to address the computational challenges to the power system planning for large-scale electric power systems. This panel will review the existing and new challenges, introduce practical cases and lessons learnt, and discuss advanced effective solutions.