A study of the parameters influencing the Capacity Credit of WECS- a simplified approach

In recent years, penetration of wind generated electricity into power grids has been increasing significantly. During the last few decades, wind energy has doubled in capacity every three years. Because of the intermittent characteristics of wind power, it is usually difficult to determine an acceptable penetration level to maintain specific reliability requirements. The need for better capacity credit assessment for wind electric conversion systems is clear. Considerable work has been done in the past to estimate the capacity credit of WECS (wind electric conversion system) and several approaches have been proposed. This paper examines the influence of different parameters on the Capacity Credit using a simplified approach based on an effective forced outage rate (FOR) for WECS. The parameters considered are penetration level, amount and variability of load, generation configuration and wind regimes.