Towards National Energy Internet: Novel Optimization Method for Preliminary Design of China’s Multi-Scale Power Network Layout

The regional imbalance of power supply and use is an important factor affecting the efficient and sustainable development of China’s power system. It is necessary to achieve the better matching of power supply and use through the optimization of the national power network layout. From a mathematical point of view, the power network layout’s optimization is a typical mixed-integer non-linear programming problem. The present paper proposes a novel method based on the Random Walk algorithm with Compulsive Evolution for China’s power network layout optimization to improve the network economy. In this method, the length of transmission lines and the amount of cross-regional power transmission between nodes are synchronously optimized. The proposed method was used to find the minimum total cost (TC) of the power transmission network on the basis of energy supply and use balance. The proposed method is applied to the optimization of power network of different scales. Results indicated that, compared with the optimization method that only optimizes the transmission line length, the TC of municipal and provincial power grids can be significantly reduced by the recommended methods. Moreover, for the national power network, through simultaneous optimization, the TC savings in 30 years of operation are significant.