Community activity room™ as a new tool for transmission operation and planning under a competitive power market

A power market is a community of electricity. Participants would benefit from knowing the effect of transmission limitations on their activities in that community. The community activity room^™ is a concept for treating these limits as walls of a room within which market activities can freely take place. The ability to analytically describe and visualize the community activity room in the state space of net interregional power exports will enable greater understanding of the need for more inter-state transmission superhighways. This metaphor will also enable transmission planning and operation for a large interconnected power system to evolve to the next generation of probabilistic power system reliability assessment and integration of reliability and market efficiency. This paper describes this concept and illustrates its potential applications with some examples.