Wind Integration and the Need for Advanced Decision Support Tools

Integration of wind power will require significant changes to traditional methods used for system planning and operations. In particular, the probabilistic nature of wind will require modifications of traditional unit commitment and economic dispatch tools. These modifications are needed to allow planning studies to more accurately capture the impact that operation policies have on grid reliability and production cost. These modifications are also needed to better incorporate uncertainty in the decision support tools available to operators. In all time frames, the goal is to make effective use of flexible resources by considering appropriate tradeoffs between their costs and the capabilities they provide. This paper reviews modifications such as stochastic unit commitment and dynamic scheduling and the appropriate used of these capabilities in the presence of a range of optimization time horizons and operational constraints.