Wind generation curtailment to relieve line overload in an on-line environment

In areas with high wind power penetration, the protection of transmission lines from overload during critical contingencies is an important issue. The objective of this research is to formulate the technical problem and develop a methodology to solve the problem associated with overloading of transmission facilities in high wind generation areas. The proposed method is to curtail the wind turbine Outputs through the Energy Management System facilities in the on-line operational environment. The proposed method, which is based on linear optimization, sends the calculated control signals via the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system to wind farm controllers. The necessary ramping of the wind farm outputs is implemented by the appropriate blade pitch angle control at the turbine level. The curtailment strategy is tested with an equivalent system model of MidAmerican Energy Company (MEC). The results show that the line overload in high wind generation areas can be alleviated by controlling the outputs of the wind farms step-by-step over an allowable period of time. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.