Applications of operation research to the analysis for the impacts of the transmission line capacity limitation on clean power development

As global warming has become an issue that all human beings have to address, it is time to figure out how to reform our power system such that we can reduce the CO2 emission meanwhile stimulating the development of clean energy, such as wind energy. Because wind energy is not so dispatchable as fossil energy and it is always located in remote areas far away from high-power-demand areas, it is necessary to set up new transmission lines to transmit the clean power to these power-hungry areas. In this paper, we use a modeling framework (designed by ourselves [3]) to do sensitivity analysis on the transmission line capacity expansion. In our modeling framework, we use linear and mixed linear programming to model the fossil and wind power capacity expansion problems. Our results show that transmission line capacity expansion associated with wind power generation systems play a crucial role in the process of strategy-level clean power system development.