Estimating and visualizing the impact of wind forecast errors on system operations

With more wind power on the system, operators need to make decisions with power output uncertainties coming from multiple locations. The cumulative effects of all the uncertainties on the system are non-obvious. Incorrect assessment of the cumulative effect could affect the reliability and stability of the power system. This paper proposes a method of utilizing very short term wind forecasts (less than 6 hours ahead) for multiple wind farm sites to analyze potential system impacts. The output is a visualization that can alert system operators to possible transmission line overloads. In addition, this paper proposes a modification to a prior method that estimates the confidence interval of a forecast. The modified method performs well for very short term forecasts of less than 6 hours.