Active power regulation of wind power systems through demand response

With the specific characteristics of low-carbon intensity and economy, wind power has been widely promoted around the world. Due to the variable and intermittent nature of wind power production, the system has to frequently redispatch generators in order to ensure the effective use of wind power whilst maintaining system security. In this way, traditional generation costs are increased and the social benefit of wind power decreases indirectly. In this paper, a new regulation strategy based on power flow tracing was proposed, taking advantage of a comfort-constrained demand response strategy to follow the fluctuations of wind farm output, with the remaining imbalance of active power compensated by traditional generators. Examples showed that compared with conventional regulation, demand response could reduce the gross operating costs of the system, and the rapid response could help maintaining system stability in case of contingency. The strategy in this paper also applies to other large-scale integration problems associated with renewable energy resources which display short-term production variability.