Sizing an energy storage system to minimize wind power imbalances from the hourly average

Variability and uncertainty in wind power represent significant risks to system operators as well as wind farm owners. The coupling of wind with energy storage systems has been used as a means of managing wind power variability and intermittency. The purpose of this paper is to provide a methodology to estimate the size (power and energy capacities) of an energy storage system with the goal of minimizing deviations from the hourly average wind power production. Using a probabilistic forecast of the hourly average wind power production and the inverse of the joint cumulative distribution of the maximum and minimum deviations from the hourly average, hour-long wind power production scenarios are generated. The statistics of the energy storage system´s characteristics are then estimated from these scenarios as a function of the desired risk parameter. The evaluation of the proposed methodology using real-world wind power data reveals that the generated wind power production scenarios have distributions which exhibit a small statistical distance to the actual ones. Moreover, the estimated energy storage system characteristics have coverage rates close to the nominal ones, with an average absolute deviation less than 1.5%.