Legacy long-term capacity planning approaches are grossly inadequate for deeply decarbonized power systems. Wind and solar resources, unlike traditional generation resources, are variable, intermittent and are subject to heightened uncertainty. On top of this, energy storage technologies are now mature and scalable enough to be integrated as part of the resource mix. The unifying feature between renewables and storage resources is that the time dimension is essential when representing them in planning problems – e.g., since it is necessary to capture capacity variability and ramping phenomena in renewables and energy-power dynamics in energy storage systems. However, this feature can come at an enormous computational cost because a fine time discretization is needed to represent real time operations with sufficient fidelity. In this talk, we will introduce the concept of state-space capacity planning as a way to compress out the time dimension in long-term capacity planning problems. As the name implies, state-space planning is done by recognizing the dynamic couplings that exist between energy, power and ramping in operations. We argue that this approach is capable of producing capacity expansion plans of quality similar to those obtained by brute force high-dimensionality approaches in the case of ramp-power couplings. We offer initial thoughts about how to address energy-power-ramp couplings.

François Bouffard is Associate Professor, William Dawson Scholar and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Affairs in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada. He received the B.Eng. (Hons.) and the Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering in 2000 and 2006, respectively, also from McGill.

From 2006 to 2010, he held a lectureship (Assistant Professor) in electric power and energy with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom, before joining McGill in 2010. His research and teaching expertise are in the fields of low-carbon power and energy system modeling, economics, reliability, control and optimization.

He is a licensed engineer in the province of Quebec, Canada, a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a member of the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES). He served on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Power Systems (2009-2018) and of the IEEE Power Engineering Letters (2012-2018), and he served as Technical Committee Program Chair (2016-2019), Secretary (2020-2022), Vice-Chair (2022-2024), and now Chair of the Power System Operation, Planning and Economics committee of IEEE PES. He is also serving as Strategic Advisor to the board of directors of Brainbox AI Inc., and he is the Vice-Chair of the Intelligent Building Systems standard (T2000) of CSA.