A quantitative approach to wind farm diversification and reliability

This paper proposes a general planning method to minimize the variance of aggregated wind farm power output by optimally distributing a predetermined number of wind turbines over a preselected number of potential wind farming sites. The objective is to facilitate high wind power penetration through the search for steadier overall power output. Another optimization formulation that takes into account the correlations between wind power outputs and load is also presented. Three years of wind data from the recent NREL/3TIER study in the western US provides the statistics for evaluating each site upon their mean power output, variance and correlation with each other so that the best allocations can be determined. The reliability study reported in this paper investigates the impact of wind power output variance reduction on a power system composed of a virtual wind power plant and a load modeled from the 1996 IEEE RTS. Some traditional reliability indices such as the LOLP are calculated and it is eventually shown that configurations featuring minimal global power output variances generally prove the most reliable provided the sites are not significantly correlated with the modeled load. Consequently, the choice of uncorrelated/negatively correlated sites is favored. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.