A Tri-Level Model of Centralized Transmission and Decentralized Generation Expansion Planning for an Electricity Market—Part I

We develop a tri-level model of transmission and generation expansion planning in a deregulated power market environment. Due to long planning/construction lead times and concerns for network reliability, transmission expansion is considered in the top level as a centralized decision. In the second level, multiple decentralized GENCOs make their own capacity expansion decisions while anticipating a wholesale electricity market equilibrium in the third level. The collection of bi-level games in the lower two levels forms an equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints (EPEC) that can be approached by either the diagonalization method (DM) or a complementarity problem (CP) reformulation. We propose a hybrid iterative solution algorithm that combines a CP reformulation of the tri-level problem and DM solutions of the EPEC sub-problem.