Abstract

The rapid growth of hyperscale data centers challenges grid expansion planning, yet existing studies focus largely on operational flexibility rather than long-term investment decisions. This paper examines how large data center loads sited at multiple buses affect co-optimized Transmission Expansion Planning (TEP) and Generation Expansion Planning (GEP). The problem is formulated as a multi-year, Unit Commitment (UC)-embedded mixed-integer linear program on the modified IEEE 24-bus Reliability Test System (RTS-24) with Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT)-calibrated renewable energy profiles. A 500MWdata center load, about 17.5% of the base-year peak, is allocated across four buses by voltage level, generation headroom, renewable co-location, and network connectivity. Integrating this load raises the 15-year net present value of total system cost by $1,794M (+61.6%) and the system-average locational marginal price (LMP) by 45.2%, with operating cost dominating capital investment (84.2% versus 15.8%). Renewable curtailment remains negligible: existing renewables are already near full utilization, so the added demand is served almost entirely by incremental thermal generation. Most notably, the load shifts the optimal plan from transmission-only to generation-only, replacing the basecase 230 kV reinforcement with a new 400 MW combined-cycle gas turbine and showing that strategically sited generation can substitute for network reinforcement.

Index Terms

Data center, generation expansion planning, transmission expansion planning, unit commitment

Cite this paper:

Haoxiang Wan, Xingpeng Li, Jonghwan Kwon,“Impact of Data Center Load on Co-Optimized Generation and Transmission Expansion Planning with Embedded Unit Commitment”, IEEE Texas Power and Energy Conference, College Station, TX, USA, Feb. 2027.