Transmission Expansion Planning in the Nordic System for Wind Power Integration based on Ant Colony Optimization

Abstract

This paper presents a transmission expansion algorithm based on ant colony optimization. It was developed and tested on a model for the Nordic area. The main focus of this work was to build a transmission expansion planning tool able to cope with the new challenge of large wind power integration. Thus, the optimization uses hourly time steps to include wind and load variations. Nevertheless, the overall simulation time to find good solutions is quite fast using heuristic information. The ant colony optimization method proved to be flexible and delivered reasonable results for the calculated scenario of wind power integration for 2030.