Emissions reduction and risk management in the assessment of energy reserve in the presence of wind generation plants

With increasing concern over global climate change, policy makers are promoting renewable energy sources, predominantly wind generation, as a means of fulfillment of targets of emissions reduction. This paper presents a system well-being approach to calculate the system reserve useful to achieve the expected risk of Loss-Of-Load due to unit failure and uncertain nature of production of wind power, with the aim of minimizing the sum of external and industrial costs for electricity production, thus fulfilling also requirements on reduction of emissions. Due to the uncertainty of wind speed, production by wind turbine generators may cause an increasing need for supplementary energy reserve. As a result of the application of an optimization problem embedding both the cost of emissions and the risk of Loss of Load, two different operating scenarios were then analyzed, comparing the two cases of presence and absence of wind turbine generators within energy reserve availability.