Adequacy Assessment of Power-generating Systems Including Wind Power Integration Based on Ant Colony System Algorithm

Adequacy assessment of power-generating systems is an effective measure to ensure proper system operations in the face of various uncertainties such as equipment failures and variations of generation and load. The integration of time- dependent sources such as wind turbine generators (WTGs) makes the reliability evaluation process more challenging. Due to the large number of system states involved in a power-generating system, it is normally not feasible to enumerate all possible failure states to calculate the reliability indices. Thus, some metaheuristics-based search algorithms, through their inherent convergence mechanisms, appear promising to find out the most meaningful system states in a reasonable time. In this paper, an ant colony system (ACS) based optimization procedure is adopted to assess the power-generating system adequacy including wind power integration since ACS has shown to be an outstanding discrete optimizer. The most probable failure states are searched out by ACS and they contribute most significantly to the adequacy indices including loss of load expectation (LOLE), loss of load frequency (LOLF), and expected energy not supplied (EENS). A modified IEEE Reliability Test System (IEEE-RTS) is used to verify the applicability and validity of the proposed approach.