Air-Pollution Impact of Transmission Line Capacity Expansions in Power Systems

In this paper, we study the environmental effects on global and local pollutant emissions derived from the incorporation of new transmission circuits in existing corridors, and the interrelationships with the system economic costs and the system reliability variations. For that purpose, we develop a methodology that allows quantifying the indirect impact on pollutant emissions due to variations in power plants’ dispatch when adding a line circuit to a hydrothermal power system. Our methodology also allows the analysis of the effect of N – 1 security criterion over the pollutant emission displacement, as well as the effect of changes in demand, the hydrology scenarios, and the failure cost. We illustrate our methodology using a simplified version of the main Chilean network.