Quantifying Risk of Interruptions and Evaluating Generation System Adequacy with Wind Generation

Wind power, both on-and offshore, is presently the principal commercially available and scaleable renewable energy technology and is envisaged to deliver the majority of the required growth in renewable energy in the medium-term future. As the magnitude of this intermittent source connected into the existing systems is growing, concerns regarding the security and economics of the electricity supply are rising. This paper applies an analytical technique; frequency and duration method (FDM) to determine the additional risk of supply at various levels of wind generation in terms of frequency, duration and magnitude of capacity shortfall conditions. This information regarding potential capacity deficits is combined with customer worth of supply to evaluate the cost of interruptions. This is subsequently applied along with capacity investment costs to assess the tradeoff between capacity investment and system security which evolves a new cost-based approach. This new approach is particularly useful to evaluate the optimum level of overall capacity in systems having various levels of wind generation