Coupling of the planning and power system analysis software for high-level penetration of renewable energy sources

• Hight complexity of electricity production decisions require mosaic approaches. • Transmission grid power flows must be analyzed when planning electricity production investment. • Uncertainty in electricity production investment related to power grid is decreased by coupling. • Coupling results with improved technical feasibility of planning activities. • Prospective scenarios become more realistic when power flows in transmission grid are analyzed. The ambitious electricity production investments might have a degree of uncertainty if current or planned power grid is not analyzed. Strategic planning of the national energy system using only EnergyPLAN annual simulations could be inaccurate resulting in wrong planning decisions because EnergyPLAN does not take power grid into account. Therefore, there is a need to analyze power grid using power system solver in order to complete evaluation of electricity production investments. To address this need, EnergyPLAN and the power system solver CASE are coupled by upgrading CASE to import output files generated by EnergyPLAN. Once the data is imported, CASE allocates the total electricity production across individual power plants based on predefined distribution coefficients, and distributes total consumption to system nodes proportionally to the existing connected loads. Thus, a power system model for load flow calculation is automatically created and calculations are performed for each hour of the year. The goal of this paper is to present original implementation of the coupling of two software tools in the first place, which has not been realized until now, as well as the presentation of the calculation results in the second place. The presented results were selected for being the most interesting among the numerous hours of the year using simulation model of real power system of Republic of Serbia upgraded with planned large renewable electricity production. The result of the work is the coupling of two software tools with a goal of more accurate power system planning. The coupling provides a way to investigate if various scenarios of planned electricity production could be realized regarding transmission grid load flows.