Methods for Assessing Available Wind Primary Power Reserve

To ensure power system security with very high wind generation (WG) penetration, the participation of wind generators in primary frequency control is essential. Previous studies have shown the technical capability of wind turbines to participate in primary frequency regulation at a wind farm level. In order to analyze, the contribution of wind power to primary frequency regulation at system level one needs to quantify the amount of primary reserve from conventional sources that can be displaced. This amount of reserve depends on the aggregated variability of WG during each reserve provision time-interval. This paper presents a statistical approach to assess the impact of intrahour wind power variability on the volume of primary reserve that can be provided from WG. Furthermore, the effectiveness of different reserve allocation strategies is compared. The proposed approach is applied to a case study based on real-wind data measurements from the French island of Guadeloupe. Results show that for a small isolated system neglecting WG intrahourly variability leads to an overestimation of its contribution to primary reserve.