  Transmission topology control is a tool used by system operators in the role
of a control action taken into account as a preventive or corrective action
relative to a specific outage or set of outages. However, their inclusion in
most electricity market frameworks is limited. With the increasing penetration
of intermittent energy sources, optimal topology can be used as a lever of
flexibility to decrease the total system cost. This paper demonstrates the
evolution of optimal topology control on systems with increasing quantities of
intermittent renewable energy along two axes. First, the effects of the
increased variable sources on the variations of optimal topology are explored.
Second, we elaborate on the growing advantages of exploiting transmission level
grid flexibility in terms of total system cost. Case studies are performed on a
modified RTS-96 network.
