Synthesis of wind time series for network adequacy assessment

Abstract

When representing the stochastic characteristics of wind generators within power system simulations, the spatial and temporal correlations of the wind resource must be correctly modelled to ensure that reserve and network capacity requirements are not underestimated. A methodology for capturing these correlations within a vector auto-regressive (VAR) model is presented, and applied to a large-scale reanalysis dataset of historical wind speed data for the British Isles. This is combined with a wind speed-to-power conversion model trained against historically metered data from wind farms on the Great Britain (GB) electricity system in order to derive a lightweight model for simulating injections of wind power across a transmission network. The model is demonstrated to adequately represent ramp rates, both at a site and network level, as well as the individual correlations between sites, while being suitable for network adequacy studies which may require the simulation of many years of operation.