A methodology to consider combined electrical infrastructure and real-time power-flow impact costs in planning large-scale renewable energy farms

The U.S federal government's strategic vision encouraging renewable energy production has motivated several new energy generation projects. Among them are large-scale renewable energy farm building efforts, where one considers the renewable resource potential along with land, equipment, and installation costs. The goal in the planning phase of these efforts is to maximize the return on investment and resource utilization. The challenge, which is specific to integrating new generation is the need to include the operational cost (both construction as well as run-time) of introducing power to the existing infrastructure. In this paper, we propose a methodology to account for and include energy transmission line proximity (a construction time cost) as well as thermal-overload, and voltage out-of-range (an infrastructure cost) factors when we plan to “tap” into an existing infrastructure. We present results for a study over regions in Texas, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico and Oklahoma and discuss the findings.