Reliability/cost evaluation of a wind power delivery system

When the geographical locations with good wind resources are not close to the main load centers, it becomes extremely important to assess adequate transmission facility to deliver wind power to the power grid. A probabilistic method is presented to evaluate the contribution of a wind power delivery system to the overall system reliability. The basic model incorporates transmission line connecting a remotely located large wind farm to a conventional grid system. The classical generation system adequacy evaluation model is extended to incorporate limited transmission system. The mean Capacity Outage Probability Table (mean-COPT) concept is used to increase the computational efficiency as it allows determination of EUE (expected unserved energy) and LOLE (loss of load expectation) simultaneously in calculation of reliability indices of the generating system. The wind farm generation model is obtained by superimposing simulated wind speed, obtained from developed ARMA time series model, on power curve of Wit. An apportioning method has been used to reduce the number of states in the resulting model, obtaining an equivalent reduced 5-state model. Applying transmission line constraints result in wind generation model ranging from 2- to 5-state models. The study recognizes benefits from fuel offset by wind power, reliability worth and environmental improvement and determines appropriate transmission line capacity based on its contribution to the overall system risk and associated transmission system cost. The paper illustrates results using a real wind farm. The presented methods and discussions should be useful to power system planners and policy makers. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.