A simplified wind power generation model for reliability evaluation

Renewable energy sources, especially wind turbine generators, are considered as important generation alternatives in electric power systems due to their nonexhausted nature and benign environmental effects. The fact that wind power penetration continues to increase has motivated a need to develop more widely applicable methodologies for evaluating the actual benefits of adding wind turbines to conventional generating systems. Reliability evaluation of generating systems with wind energy sources is a complex process. It requires an accurate wind speed forecasting technique for the wind farm site. The method requires historical wind speed data collected over many years for the wind farm location to determine the necessary parameters of the wind speed models for the particular site. The evaluation process should also accurately model the intermittent nature of power output from the wind farm. A sequential Monte Carlo simulation or a multistate wind farm representation approach is often used. This paper presents a simplified method for reliability evaluation of power systems with wind power. The development of a common wind speed model applicable to multiple wind farm locations is presented and illustrated with an example. The method is further simplified by determining the minimum multistate representation for a wind farm generation model in reliability evaluation. The paper presents a six-step common wind speed model applicable to multiple geographic locations and adequate for reliability evaluation of power systems containing significant wind penetration. Case studies on a test system are presented using wind data from Canadian geographic locations.