MPC for reducing energy storage requirement of wind power systems

This paper discusses using the battery energy storage system (BESS) to mitigate wind power intermittency, so that wind power can be dispatchable on an hourly basis like fossil fuel power plants. In particular, model predictive control (MPC) is used to control the charge and discharge of BESS to compensate for wind power forecast errors and minimize operation costs to the wind farm owner. A ramp rate penalty on wind power scheduling is included in the optimization to make the optimal control trajectory smoother, while the performance is kept intact. Numerical simulations with a one-year long wind power dataset show that MPC controller is much more effective in reducing the operation cost to the wind farm owner than the heuristic control algorithm or conventional reserves, in that BESS with a much smaller capacity will be suffice to achieve the same cost reduction.