A Wind Farm Reliability Model Considering Both Wind Variability and Turbine Forced Outages

Abstract

This paper presents an analytical method to model the output of large wind farms for power system reliability assessment. The model considers the variability of wind, random failures (forced outages) of turbines, as well as the correlation between turbine outputs that results from the turbines on a farm being subjected to similar incident wind speeds. Due to this correlation, the outputs of individual turbines cannot be modeled as independent random variables. The problem is addressed here by separately modeling the independent outages of wind turbines and the dependency on wind speed, and then convolving the two distributions. The resulting model includes both probability and frequency distributions of the power output of the wind farm. The proposed method is demonstrated on the IEEE Reliability Test System. Monte Carlo simulation is used to validate the results.