Statistical Wind Speed Interpolation for Simulating Aggregated Wind Energy Production under System Studies

In this paper we present a statistical interpolation method to generate a time series of system-aggregated wind power production values that can be used as an input to system operations planning tools such as unit commitment (UC) and economic dispatch (ED). We use historical wind speed data measured at several locations, in order to estimate average wind patterns and express the covariance between locations as a function of their distance. Then, for a new set of locations where wind parks are planned, we create wind time series for the study period such that the spatial correlation between the sites is taken into account. Depending on the system under study, this may be of specific importance due to the concentration of areas with favorable wind conditions, resulting in strong correlations between wind park outputs. These cross-correlations are essential when evaluating system adequacy and security in planning mode, in the presence of large-scale wind power. The resulting aggregated wind power time series are finally fed into the UC-ED module to help evaluate the amount of total system reserve required to maintain an adequate level of reliability. The method is applied to a simplified version of the Dutch power system