  An immediate need in the transmission system is to find alternative solutions
that improve system operation and defer the need for new transmission lines.
This study comprehensively evaluates the performance and economic benefits of
using battery energy storage systems (BESS) as virtual transmission (VT) to
promote power transfer cross distant regions. Specifically, this work
implements various day-ahead energy scheduling models to analyze the impact of
VT on system operation cost, network congestion, model computational time, and
market performance. The performance of VT is compared with three alternative
network congestion mitigation methods, including building new high-voltage
physical transmission lines, cost-driven battery energy storage systems, and
network reconfiguration, as well as combinations of two of aforementioned
methods. The benchmark day-ahead scheduling model is a traditional
security-constrained unit commitment model without system upgrades or other
network congestion mitigation. Numerical simulations conducted on the IEEE
24-bus system demonstrate that among all the examined schemes, VT is the only
one comparable to physical transmission lines that can provide satisfying
congestion relief and operation cost reduction without sacrificing computing
time and load payment significantly.
