The last two decades have brought about significant changes in the resource planning environment of electric power utilities throughout the world. The conventional generation technologies that have been the backbone of every electric utility i.e., coal, hydro, nuclear, oil and natural gas, are being re-examined to address environmental concerns and resource utilization. The research described in this thesis focuses on the adequacy and economic assessment of non-utility generation (NUG) and demand-side management (DSM) initiatives within a typical power system. The main objective was to examine and extend the ability of the contingency enumeration approach to evaluate the economic reliability benefits of incorporating NUG and DSM options separately or jointly in composite system adequacy assessment. Two test systems were employed in the evaluations. The studies undertaken in this thesis demonstrate the need for accurate load model representations which clearly reflect the mix of customer sectors at each bus.Chronological hourly load curves were developed for each load bus in the test systems recognizing the individual load profiles of the customers. The adequacy and economic implications of demand-side management initiatives in the test systems were examined at each load point in the composite generation and transmission configuration. This thesis illustrates the development of techniques by which system planners and operators can incorporate reliability cost/worth assessment power system applications. Focus is placed in the thesis on the utilization of reliability cost/worth concepts in integrated resource planning in the form of NUG additions and DSM initiatives. Methods for the joint implementation of NUG and DSM options in a composite power system are presented and examples from the studies conducted are used to illustrate the procedures. Studies are presented which illustrate the impacts of NUG additions and DSM initiatives on the test system planning reserve margins (PRM) and on the total societal cost of electrical energy. The total evaluated cost incorporates the explicit cost associated with customer failures but does not include the cost associated with DSM program implementation. The results of the studies conducted show that NUG facilities and DSM programs can have considerable reliability and economic impacts on electric power systems.

abstract: In the deregulated power system, locational marginal prices are used in transmission engineering predominantly as near real-time pricing signals. This work extends this concept to distribution engineering so that a distribution class locational marginal price might be used for real-time pricing and control of advanced control systems in distribution circuits. A formulation for the distribution locational marginal price signal is presented that is based on power flow sensitivities in a distribution system. A Jacobian-based sensitivity analysis has been developed for application in the distribution pricing method. Increasing deployment of distributed energy sources is being seen at the distribution level and this trend is expected to continue. To facilitate an optimal use of the distributed infrastructure, the control of the energy demand on a feeder node in the distribution system has been formulated as a multiobjective optimization problem and a solution algorithm has been developed. In multiobjective problems the Pareto optimality criterion is generally applied, and commonly used solution algorithms are decision-based and heuristic. In contrast, a mathematically-robust technique called normal boundary intersection has been modeled for use in this work, and the control variable is solved via separable programming. The Roy Billinton Test System (RBTS) has predominantly been used to demonstrate the application of the formulation in distribution system control. A parallel processing environment has been used to replicate the distributed nature of controls at many points in the distribution system. Interactions between the real-time prices in a distribution feeder and the nodal prices at the aggregated load bus have been investigated. The application of the formulations in an islanded operating condition has also been demonstrated. The DLMP formulation has been validated using the test bed systems and a practical framework for its application in distribution engineering has been presented. The multiobjective optimization yields excellent results and is found to be robust for finer time resolutions. The work shown in this report is applicable to, and has been researched under the aegis of the Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management (FREEDM) center, which is a generation III National Science Foundation engineering research center headquartered at North Carolina State University. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Electrical Engineering 2012