Multiunit Planning Assessment of Wind Power: Sensitivity to Wind Regimes

If proposed wind park configurations are planned through a globally coordinated approach across a utility service area, then electricity can be fed into the grid with substantial cost advantages. This paper shows that by four important measures, such optimal multiunit plans are sensitive to wind regimes presented by candidate sites to available makes of wind energy conversion systems (WECS). As part of the work, a pre-qualification process based on expected full-load hours (EFLH) is introduced for available makes of WECS with reference to candidate sites. It is shown that application of the pre-qualification prior to optimal multiunit planning leads to substantial improvement by the four measures. Application of the pre-qualification and planning to the state of Andhra Pradesh (India) is presented as an example case. Possible refinements and augmentations over the basic approach are discussed.