GENERATION EXPANSION PLANNING IN INTEGRATED RENEWABLE CONVENTIONAL STATUS CONSIDERING SUPPORT SCHEMES

Generation Expansion Planning (GEP) is one of the most important decision-making activities to determine the optimal strategy to plan the construction of new generation plants. Originally, GEP was faced by vertically integrated utilities with the aim of minimizing production and capital costs. After deregulation, generation companies were forced to consider GEP from the viewpoint of market shares and financial risk. In recent years, increasing concern for environmental protection has driven many countries all over the world to promote energy generation from renewable sources. Multifarious incentive-based support schemes have been designed to promote the investment in power generation exploiting renewable resources. In this paper, regarding the environmental issues, the impact of one of the most popular incentive systems, namely feed-in-tariff, on generation planning is considered, thus obtaining a comprehensive GEP model with a suitably modified objective function and additional constraints. The resulting problem is solved by gravitational search algorithm based on the Newton’s law of gravity and mass interactions. Analysis reveals that the implementation of incentive policies has remarkable impacts on investment decisions of generation companies in renewable resources and environmental issues.