Introducing environmental constraints in generation expansion problems

Generation expansion planning problems should take into account not only satisfaction of future demand but also environmental constraints, such as government imposed limits on pollution produced by coal based power plants. For a vertically integrated system of power plants, we model those features as a two-stage stochastic programming problem with recourse that can be solved by decomposition methods. We present results for different demand scenarios, corresponding to low, medium, and high economic future growth, as well as different environmental cases, with stringent and non-stringent emission limits for the thermal plants composing the electric mix. Copyright c © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.