Intelligent optimization of renewable resource mixes incorporating the effect of fuel risk, fuel cost and CO2 emission

Power system planning is a capital intensive investment-decision problem. The majority of the conven- tional planning conducted since the last half a century has been based on the least cost approach, keeping in view the optimization of cost and reliability of power supply. Recently, renewable energy sources have found a niche in power system planning owing to concerns arising from fast depletion of fossil fuels, fuel price volatility as well as global climatic changes. Thus, power system planning is under-going a paradigm shift to incorporate such recent technologies. This paper assesses the impact of renewable sources using the portfolio theory to incorporate the effects of fuel price volatility as well as CO2 emissions. An optimization framework using a robust multi-objective evolutionary algorithm, namely NSGA-II, is developed to obtain Pareto optimal solutions. The performance of the proposed approach is assessed and illustrated using the Indian power system considering real-time design prac- tices. The case study for Indian power system validates the efficacy of the proposed methodology as developing countries are also increasing the investment in green energy to increase awareness about clean energy technologies.