Impact of forecast errors on expansion planning of power systems with a renewables target

This paper analyzes the impact of production forecast errors on the expansion planning of a power system and investigates the influence of market design to facilitate the integration of renewable generation. For this purpose, we propose a programming modeling framework to determine the generation and transmission expansion plan that minimizes system-wide investment and operating costs, while ensuring a given share of renewable generation in the electricity supply. Unlike existing ones, this framework includes both a day-ahead and a balancing market so as to capture the impact of both production forecasts and the associated prediction errors. Within this framework, we consider two paradigmatic market designs that essentially differ in whether the day-ahead generation schedule and the subsequent balancing re-dispatch are co-optimized or not. The main features and results of the model set-ups are discussed using an illustrative four-node example and a more realistic 24-node case study.