A Model for Assessing the Power Variation of a Wind Farm Considering the Outages of Wind Turbines

Most of the published models cannot properly incorporate the outages of wind turbines in estimating the stochastic variation of the wind power output. In reality, wind turbines are exposed to an open and uncontrolled environment, sometimes harsh, to harvest energy from wind. The environmental condition of wind turbines is thus worse than that of the conventional generators. This results in a relatively higher outage probability of the wind turbines, which significantly affects the power output from a wind farm. This paper proposes a model for including the outage probability of wind turbines in simulating the power output of wind farms. The contribution of this paper is in introducing a model to represent the relationship between the outage probabilities of wind turbines and wind speed and then integrating this model with a frequency-domain wind power output model. A numerical simulation approach based on the Monte Carlo method is then proposed to simulate the wind power variation including the outage probability of wind turbines. A validation study based on the field-measured data from a real wind farm shows that the simulated wind power variation matches well with the actual field measurements when the probability-based outage model is included in the calculations.