The impact of a wind variable generation on the hydro generation water shadow price

The volatility and complex forecasting methods of fluctuating wind generation is a growing issue. From a system perspective, this introduces additional issues regarding demand and supply balancing and also creates the need for more balancing capacity. One of the best supplements to volatile wind nature is certainly hydro generation, especially in complement with pumped storage technology. Water can provide large backup capacity and flexibility to balance wind deviations. In this research short-run hydro-wind coordination is addressed and an approach based on the duality method of a convex programming is proposed, for valuing the impact of variable wind generation on the water shadow price of hydro generation. In such hydro-wind coordination, hydro generation is committed for the differences between the actual and forecasted wind generation. Obtaining water shadow prices is important for determining short-run marginal cost and economic feasibility assessment of this coordination. The proposed method solves short-run profit maximization, as its primal problem, and determines the values of limited hydro and wind resources, as its dual problem, using a linear programming approach. The coordination between the Vinodol hydropower plant and the Vrataru a wind farm in Croatia is presented as a case study. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.