ECO Based Solution for Generation Expansion Planning in Deregulated Power Systems

This paper presents an Election Campaign Optimizat ion (ECO) algorithm for the solution of Generation Expansion Planning (GEP) problem in a competitive electricity market. GEP is one of the important decision-making activities in electric utilit ies and plays a fundamental ro le in the deregulated environment for electricity trading. It is highly constrained non-linear dynamic optimization problem that can only be fully solved by complete enumerat ion and is computationally impossible for a real world GEP prob lem. The utility has to take both independent power producers participation and environment impact (CO2 emission) with satisfying all electrical and energy market constraints simultaneously. The proposed ECO based method has a strong ability to find most optimistic results and is robust for solution problem featuring non-linearity, non-differentiability and high-dimensionality. The proposed solution method is compared with the particle swarm optimizat ion algorithm to demonstrate its effectiveness considering different purchase prices fo r IPPs and CO2 emission limits. Analysis indicates that the proposed method is an effect ive and economical tool to solve competitive GEP problem that is easy to implement. Results can offer utilities for determining the optimal expansion planning.