Aggregation of plants within the same load zone

[staadecker]

Problem

• Some load zones have over 100 Wind and Solar plants making the model very hard to solve.

Temporary solution

• I've written a post processing step to aggregate plants using the results from a previous run to calculate aggregate capacity factors.

Next steps

• We need a more robust way to aggregate the plants and their capacity factors. We likely want a few plants in every load zone that accurately represent all the different candidate plants. The challenge is building this reduced set of representative plants. Parameters we need to consider are: capacity factors, connection costs and total generation capacity (all other parameters don't vary between Wind & Solar plants).