Assessments for the Impacts and Benefits of Wind Farm Placement

Wind generation plays a major role on renewable energy sources; it is very important for future energy developments and renewable energy industries. Therefore, the power system impacts and economic benefits of wind generation must be clarified before wind farm placement and installation. In this paper, a simple assessment method for wind farm placement combining the power system impact assessment and economic benefit analysis is proposed. For a candidate wind farm location, the maximum permitted wind generation capacity can be estimated by analytical formulas with respect to the interconnection requirements. After the maximum permitted capacity was obtained, a benefit/cost analysis can be used to determine whether this investment project is profitable. In order to simplify the whole planning procedures, a user-friendly human-machine interface (HMI) used for data input, interconnection requirement selection and final report printout is also designed in this paper. Due to the uncertainty characteristics of wind power, the sensitivity analysis for economic benefits with respect to the variations of wind speed and wind turbine (WT) cost etc. are also integrated into the proposed HMI. The assessment methods developed in this paper will be helpful for wind power industries. Test results demonstrate the validity of the proposed assessment procedures.