A Comparison of Economic Dispatch Simulations with Differing Stochastic Wind Power Models

With the threats of climate change, increased penetration of renewable energy on the electricity grid is a crucial method to reduce fossil fuel emissions. One of the main issues with renewable energy sources, such as wind, is that they produce intermittent power. There are many statistical distributions that are used to represent wind speed in a given location. These distributions can be used to develop stochastic models of wind power in a power flow simulation. This paper seeks to develop a framework for generating stochastic models from four wind speed distributions and begin to understand the effects of using a certain model in an electricity grid power flow simulation. Results demonstrate that the choice of stochastic wind model can have a noteworthy impact on the amount of additional traditional generation required in the system, and therefore great effort must be made to ensure that any model used is an accurate representation of the wind resources in the study area