Unlocking reserves with smart transmission switching

Abstract The consideration of a flexible network topology has been previously shown to produce significant benefits to power system operation. In this paper, we study the effects of considering smart transmission switching actions to unlock flexible generation resources from the network. More specifically, we consider a smart network capable of performing both preventive and real-time corrective topology changes in response to the occurrence of contingencies. The proposed economic dispatch model ensures the co-optimization of energy and reserves with pre- and post-contingency transmission switching actions, thus producing the optimal policy with transmission flexibility. An exact decomposition methodology based on the nested column-and-constraint generation algorithm is devised to address the challenging mixed-integer program arising from the proposed formulation. Numerical simulations show that the incorporation of corrective transmission switching in the optimization process offers significant benefits to system reliability and substantial cost savings.