Analysis of the power output of a Portuguese wind farm

The significant increase of production of energy from renewable sources led to the necessity of developing new ways of exploration of the power systems. The evaluation of the intermittent of the renewable generation, which characterizes some of the renewable sources, such as wind power, becomes very important to assess its impact on the generation reliability of power systems. This paper studies and analyses the reliability impact of a Portuguese wind farm in the power system using a computer model which represents the Portuguese wind farm by a Markov process. The probabilistic model combines the stochastic characteristics of wind speed with the characteristics of the wind turbines. The transition between the operative and failed states of the wind turbines, characterized by failure and repair rates, are combined with wind behaviour to allow the calculation of some performance indices used on the analysis of the wind power output expectation of the Portuguese wind farm. Some results obtained with the model applied to a Portuguese wind farm are presented. The results show the modelling of the wind farm in reliability studies and the use of the model to evaluate the generation states and their probabilities, allied to several reliability indices.