Transmission planning and investment under competitive electricity market environment

Abstract

One of the challenges for power industry restructuring is to maintain transmission system reliability. To this end, transmission expansion may be inevitable especially for developing countries. However, less attention has been devoted to developing institutional structures and incentives to assure appropriate transmission investments are made in the future, and as a result, transmission planning is becoming a problem of extensive concern. In this paper, some important issues related to transmission planning under a competitive market environment are extensively discussed including new challenges, management and regulation, investment and cost recovery, and existing methods.