This paper surveys major technical challenges for power system operations in support of large-scale wind energy integration. The fundamental difficulties of integrating wind power arise from its high inter-temporal variation and limited predictability. The impact of wind power integration is manifested in, but not limited to, scheduling, frequency regulations, and system stabilization requirements. Possible alternatives are suggested for a more reliable and cost-effective power system operation. New computationally efficient methods for improving system performances by using prediction and operational interdependencies over different time horizons remain critical open research problems.

We report the key algorithms involved in the recombination-based evolutionary software developed for planning electrical distribution networks. We focus on the dimensionality problem of large-scale networks and on the specificities of its search space. We report the difficulties in handling topology constraints and present both the geno-type and the operators to overcome such difficulties. The operators are designed to process meaningful topological information as geno-type substructures and turn the radiality and connectivity into genetic transmissible properties. First, a theoretical example is presented to illustrate important differences between other common approaches and the approach taken. Then, a real electrical industry application is presented to illustrate the ability of the approach to handle large-scale distribution-network problems.