Improving the Quality of Intermittent Wind Power and its Harvest for Steam Power Plant Operation on Power Systems

Abstract

Wind power generation exhibits intermittence on the power produced which constitutes a disadvantage to its integration into the power system operation. The challenges of handling wind power intermittence on the power system are enormous, as the impact requires the use of additional generation resources on the conventional system in order to improve the performance of the system. In this work, a remedy to the intermittence and improvement of the wind power harvest is proposed. The wind power is generated using modified wind turbines and the power is stored on a heat transfer fluid. The stored heat is then used to produce steam which is processed in a heat exchanger to drive a steam turbine power plant. This eliminates the disturbance due to the wind intermittence as presented on the results, where the power system exhibits a more stable operation (higher minimum singular values) when using the heat storage as compared to the direct wind power injection and also the wind power harvest is improved by using modified wind turbines.