MODELLING OF DECISION MAKING SUPPORT TOOLS FOR THE ASSET MANAGEMENT OPTIMIZATION IN THE ITALIAN TRANSMISSION SYSTEM

SUMMARY The recent changes in the Italian electric market and its new regulatory framework, as well as the huge growth of RES installations (mainly PV fields and wind farms), led to the need of stronger optimization strategies in the transmission system operation, especially in the medium and short term asset management. These strategies also help to better evaluate the risk profile of the power system in the asset management, especially taking into account the variable and hard-to-predict RES production and the consequent widening of reasonable generation scenarios. The paper deals with studies and analyses performed to finalize an analytical method for the asset management optimization and to model decision making support tools. The method is based on a constrained linear optimization problem and also takes into account all grid constraints, such as current and voltage limits, trough linearized load flow calculations included in the optimization iterations. A prototype, that models the transmission network of Sicily (1150 km of 380/220kV lines, peak load up to 3500 MW, more than 1400 MW of installed wind power plants and about 750 MW of installed photovoltaic plants) including loads and power plants, has been developed to check the feasibility of the model implementation.