Building generation expansion plans - A decision aid approach to use in competitive electricity markets

Generation expansion planning gained a new dimension with the advent of electricity markets. It is now an activity decoupled from transmission and there are several agents competing to generate electricity and aiming at maximizing their individual profits. In view of this, it becomes more important to develop tools to help generation agents to build their expansion plans, internalizing several uncertainties in the model, an being able to simulate different possible reactions of the other competitors, given their impact in the profits of the agent being modelled. In this paper, we present a long-term decision aid tool that uses System Dynamics to model the long run of electricity markets together with Genetic Algorithms to solve the individual expansion problem of generation agents given their mixed-integer nature. Apart from the detailed description of the developed approach, the paper also includes a Case Study based on a four generation agent system to illustrate its application.