Incorporating wind power in generating system reliability evaluation

Wind is regarded as an important energy source, and its integration into existing electric power systems dominated by conventional generating sources introduces many technical and business challenges. One important technical challenge is to incorporate wind power reliability considerations in the reliability assessment techniques presently used by electric power utilities to assess the adequacy of the overall generating capacity to serve the future load requirements. The development of comprehensive reliability evaluation techniques will become even more important for the next generation of power systems as wind power penetration levels continue to increase. This paper illustrates how the wind data at a particular site can be utilized to create wind power models and applied in generating capacity adequacy assessment. The developed concepts are applied to two published reliability test systems considering various factors, and the reliability impacts of energy storage, wind dependence on multiple wind farms, wind capacity credit and the replacement of conventional generation by wind power are illustrated. © The Society for Reliability Engineering, Quality and Operations Management (SREQOM), India and The Division of Operation and Maintenance, Lulea University of Technology, Sweden 2010.