Why we need Transmission interconnections ?

Why we need Transmission interconnections ? | Why transmission interconnection is important?

Almost in every country of the world electric supply system is widely interconnected, involving connections inside utilities.

The main reason behind interconnections are:

1. Economic
2. To reduce the cost of the electricity and
3. To improve reliability of power supply

Now, we will see in detail why we do transmission interconnection ?

1. Apart from delivery of electric power, the main purpose of the transmission interconnection network is to pool power plants and load centers in order to minimize the total power generation capacity and fuel cost.

2. Transmission interconnection also enable taking advantage of 

• Diversity of loads,
• Availability of sources,
• Fuel price in order to supply electricity to the loads at minimum cost with a required reliability.

3. In general, if a power delivery system was made up of radial lines from individual local generators without being part of a grid system that is without interconnections, many more generation resources would be needed to serve the load with the same reliability, and the cost of electricity would be much higher.

4. With that perspective, transmission is often an alternative to a new generation resource. Less transmission capability means that more generation resources would be required regardless of whether the system is made up of large or small power plants.

5. In fact, small distributed generation becomes more economically feasible if there is a backbone of a transmission grid.

6. One cannot be really sure about what the optimum balance in between generation and transmission unless the system planners use advanced methods of analysis which integrate transmission planing into an integrated value-based transmission/generation planning scenario.

7. The cost of the transmission lines and losses, as well as difficulties encountered in building new transmission capacity, and would often limit the available transmission capacity.

8. There are many cases where economic energy or reserve sharing is constrained by transmission capacity, and the situation is not getting any better.