Upgrading of the decision-making process for system development

The planning horizon for a system development planner is long and a system planner must take into account potential changes to generation capacity and demand during that horizon. The uncertainties that affect system development are greater than those that apply, for example, in system operations. Thus, it is important to build up a credible set of operating states that is informed by various uncertainties and adequately represents the range of conditions that might reasonably be expected to arise. The next step in the system development process is to assess these operating states for system operability. If a power system is not operable on some (probable) operating states, then it identifies a potential need for investment in the system. However, given the number and range of uncertainties relevant to system development, pragmatic approaches must also be developed allowing their assessment. In this report, a comprehensive system development approach is presented.