LAUSR

Recent trends in gas-fired power plant installation has increased the connections between the electric power and natural gas industries. Despite these dependencies, both industries must meet commercial, political, operational, and technical requirements that often force the industries to plan and operate in isolation. As a result, undesired situations may arise, such as those experienced by both systems during the winter of 2013/2014 in the northeastern United States. In this paper, we consider the technical challenges and present a Combined Electricity and Gas Expansion (CEGE) planning model. The CEGE model minimizes the cost of meeting gas and electricity demand during high-stress conditions and introduces an elasticity model for analysis of gas-price volatility caused by congestion. The underlying mathematical formulation considers recent advances in convex approximations to make the problem computationally tractable when applied to large-scale CEGE instances. We conduct an in-depth analysis on integrated test systems that include the New England area.