The importance of sub-hourly modeling with a high penetration of wind generation

Power systems are evolving to incorporate greater penetrations of variable renewables and consequently many wind integration studies are being conducted worldwide. For reasons such as computational effort and availability of data, these studies are often conducted using hourly resolution data. This paper examines if hourly resolution modeling is adequate at high penetrations of wind power, or if the intra-hour variability of wind is significant enough to warrant sub-hourly modeling. The results find that sub-hourly modeling reveal substantially higher levels of generator cycling and utilization of flexible generation and storage units than is seen at hourly resolution.