9420667 Rahman As a result of the changed priorities in the power industry in the United States, it is believed that environment-sensitive planning with a focus on transmission open-access needs significant attention in power engineering research. A research effort is proposed which will deal with environmental quality, impacts of environmental considerations on reliability, and ways to incorporate transmission cost in pricing the cost of energy with environmental externalities. The proposed research will integrate the environmental considerations explicitly into the power system planning process and incorporate load uncertainties arising from the possibility of the loss of wholesale loads to external suppliers (due to transmission open-access). This will be accomplished by applying the eigenvector (EVM) and the interdependent data analysis (IDA) technique in extracting expert opinions on scenario likelihoods for uncertainties related to transmission access. ***
