Grid expansion planning for carbon emissions reduction

In recent years the grid expansion planning problem has become increasingly complex and challenging. The integration of renewable generation is a source of many of these challenges. These challenges often include a deficiency in transmission capacity in regions with high potential for renewable energy production. Historically, this lack of capacity has had adverse effects such as negative price market conditions or the curtailing of other green generation sources. This paper considers a combined generation and transmission expansion model to avoid the curtailment of existing green generation sources, in other words maximize the realized carbon reduction of adding renewable generation. Recent work on Randomized Constructive Heuristics (RCH) has shown this approach to be quite effective in addressing the Transmission Network Expansion Planning (TNEP) problem. In this paper, we propose a generalization of RCH to handle simultaneous carbon reduction and expansion cost objectives as well as multi-scenario planning.