A new vision for transmission operation and planning under an open power market

A power market is a community of electricity. Participants would benefit from knowing the effect of transmission limitations on their activities in that community. A new concept will be presented for treating these limits as walls of a room within which market activities can freely take place. The size of the room available for inter-state power transactions depend on the amount of local loads that also use the same transmission lines. This is much like local traffic using inter-state highways for local trips and causing congestion during rush hours. The particular combination of net imports and net exports for the areas within the community define the current operating point, as a location inside the room. The ability to analytically describe and visualize this room in the state space of net interregional power exports will enable greater understanding of the need for more inter-state transmission superhighways. This metaphor will also enable transmission planning and operation for a large interconnected power system to evolve to the next generation of probabilistic power system reliability assessment and integration of reliability and market efficiency.