Quantifying Short-Term Wind Power Variability Using the Conditional Range Metric

Quantifying wind power variability is essential to power system operators, since wind power variability has a significant effect on the system operating reserve requirements and an underestimation of these requirements can severely affect the reliability of the system. Moreover, quantifying wind power variability, regardless of its uncertainty, can provide important characteristics generators must have so as to accommodate wind power fluctuations. The objective of this paper is to provide a metric to quantify short-term wind power variability. The general idea lies in comparing and quantifying the variability of a source using its range of outputs over a given period, conditioned on certain influential variables. The proposed conditional range metric (CRM) can be thought of as an “interval estimation” of the wind power over a given length time interval and can be used in conjunction with state-of-the-art forecasting as a valuable input in enhancing decision making under uncertainty.