RESILIENT

Contact: Blazhe Gjorgiev

This project, sponsored by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy under the research programme Grids, is a collaborative effort between the RRE, PSL, FEN, and ESC. The project partners will work together with Swissgrid during the execution of the project.

The objective of this project is to investigate the impacts of security-informed generation and transmission expansion planning of the Swiss net-zero energy transition within a European context. The analysis includes evaluating a range of uncertain future transition pathways, assessing the uses of flexibility and proposing alternative planning procedures. The main scientific novelties are: 1) identification of candidate transmission system branches using a systematic procedure, 2) coordinating the planning of generation and transmission expansion by considering both a cost and a risk-based perspective and 3) computational tractability which allows investigating the Swiss power system in full detail. Through our partnership with Swissgrid, this work aims to provide methods and planning tools that will be implementable additions to the existing Swissgrid ‘Strategic Grid’ evaluation. Furthermore, we aim to make the developed tool open-source and thus reach a wider community of researchers and practitioners.

Key contributions by the RRE Lab:

The Reliability and Risk Engineering Lab plays a central role in:

1. Scenario and metric definition:
   • Participate in developing scenarios and metrices relevant for assessing system security and thus the need for grid expansion.
2. Methods and tools:
   • Further develop our modelling tool Cascades for grid analyses and transmission expansion planning.
   • Further improving on the interfaces between Cascades and CentIv (centralized expansion planning).
3. Grid planning principles:
   • Participate in assessing the system security of the current power grid of Switzerland and use these results as a reference, i.e., evaluate how system security will evolve with all future scenarios.
     
   • Participate in assessing how existing and new sources of flexibility (from both supply and demand) used in the scenarios help to ensure network resilience.
   • In coordination with Swissgrid, participate in the development of necessary new transmission expansion planning principles that better identify critical elements and enable efficient grid developments in the face of the uncertain Swiss energy transition.