Increasing global energy consumption and consequent greenhouse gas emissions pose great challenges to the sustainable development of international human society. Electricity constitutes the largest part of energy carriers, and the power sector is identified as the key sector with great carbon dioxide mitigation potential. Therefore, power generation expansion planning (GEP) problem has drawn great attention due to its important role in global energy supply, renewable energy utilization and carbon dioxide mitigation. Several important issues, including renewable energy sources integration, operating reserve, deregulated power market, demand response and carbon pricing mechanism should be incorporated in a GEP problem. Energy system engineering provides a methodological framework to address the complex energy, economic and environmental problems by adopting an integrated systematic approach, featuring superstructure-based modeling, mixed-integer programming, multi-objective optimization, and optimization under uncertainty. Recent advances of these approaches in GEP problems related to the five issues mentioned above are reviewed and discussed in this article. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.