Incorporating wind power curtailment in reliability and wind energy benefit assessment

Fossil fuel is presently a major source for electricity production, but it contributes significantly to Green House Gas emissions. Wind is a promising alternative, and can potentially become a major power resource in future power systems. Wind power installations are growing significantly for producing clean energy in electric power systems. As the wind penetration continues to increase to relatively high levels, it can significantly affect the overall performance and reliability of the power system. Hence, it becomes very important to accurately model the behaviour of wind, its interaction with conventional sources and also with other wind resources connected to the power system in order to conduct a realistic assessment of system reliability and benefits from wind energy utilization. When the wind penetration levels are low, all the wind energy generated is utilized to serve the load. However, at higher wind penetration levels, wind energy is spilled due to limitations in the operating reserve or ramping capability of the scheduled generating units. The system reliability and the wind energy benefits are reduced as the wind energy spillage increases due to wind curtailment. Hence, accurate wind models should be researched and developed to include wind energy curtailment in the reliability modelling, considering factors such as the system load level, priority loading order of the generating unit and response rates of the generating units. Researchers have not incorporated these factors in wind power modelling and in the adequacy evaluation of wind integrated power systems. A new analytical technique is developed in the subsequent chapters to carry out a comprehensive wind absorption capability evaluation of the power system, and also to incorporate this characteristic in reliability modelling of the system. Wind curtailments can take place not only due to generation constraints, but also due to transmission line constraints depending on the capacity and location of the wind energy resource in the power system, and the power transfer capacity of the transmission lines connected to the wind farm bus. Therefore, reliability modelling of the power system considering wind curtailments due to both generation and transmission constraints should be carried out to assess the impact of wind farms on bulk system reliability and the wind energy benefits. Wind curtailment is incorporated in the composite power system reliability evaluation by modelling the wind resource both as generation and as negative load. The techniques can be utilized to conduct system adequacy and wind energy benefit assessment both at the capacity planning stages and composite generation/transmission planning stages, incorporating wind power curtailment due to generating unit response limitations. As the wind penetration in a power system increases, the wind farms connected to the system are distributed at different geographical locations. Both analytical and Monte Carlo Simulation based techniques have previously been used by the research group at the University of Saskatchewan to include the cross correlation between the wind characteristics of different wind farms in the wind modelling for reliability evaluation of power systems. However, the combined effect of wind diversity and wind curtailments due to both transmission and generation constraints on the system reliability and wind energy benefit assessment has not been considered. The techniques developed for system adequacy and wind energy benefit assessment considering wind curtailment due to generation and transmission constraints are further modified and presented in this thesis to include wind diversity in the analysis. The developed techniques for adequacy evaluation of wind integrated power systems considering wind power curtailment and diversity should be extremely useful for system planning engineers and policy makers as wind power penetration in power systems continues to increase throughout the world