Data Constrained Adequacy Assessment for Wind Resource Planning

Environmental concerns caused by burning fossil fuel and the safety concerns associated with nuclear power plants have led to increased interest and investment in wind power. Wind penetration in power systems has been rapidly increasing worldwide and has resulted in increased variability and uncertainty in power generation. Proper modeling of the wind resource has, therefore, become increasingly important in modern wind-integrated power systems. The correlation between wind speeds at multiple wind farms considerably affects the overall variability of wind power generation. Many power utilities are considering expansion to multiple wind farms. Analysis of wind power at different sites requires sufficient time-synchronized wind data in order to incorporate their cross-correlations in the evaluation model. Such data are usually not available or very limited for many prospective wind sites that may be considered in energy planning or policy making. This paper proposes a simple analytical method to develop approximate wind models when time-synchronized wind data for two wind sites are not available and further extends the method to incorporate more than two wind sites.