Analysis of the System Costs of Wind Variability Through Monte Carlo Simulation

Wind power forecast uncertainty raises concerns of the impact of wind power on power system and electricity market operations. The analysis presented in this paper uses an optimal power flow (OPF) model in a Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) framework to estimate the cost impacts from the uncertainty in windfarm output. Using various regional load levels, and assumptions on the costs for providing balancing energy, the results from the OPF and MCS show that wind power forecast uncertainty for the test system can increase production cost up to 350 times, though for most cases the forecast uncertainty does not introduce significant changes from the base cases. The real and reactive power losses are shown to be higher for scenarios with low wind-high load and high wind-low load as compared to the moderate wind-load cases.