Improvements in the Current Brazil's Energy Dispatch Optimization: Load Forecast and Wind Power

In the last years, Brazil has been passing through some significant changes into its electricity matrix, where natural gas, wind power and other renewables sources are increasing its share on power generation. Those on going changes represent a challenge to power generation dispatch, demanding improvements and major changes on its management and optimization, especially due to growing levels of wind power generation. From the power demand perspective, the use of too optimist power demand forecasts for energy planning and dispatch optimization purposes affects it directly. This article intends to address those two issues, as it proposes an alternative model to forecast electricity demand and conceives a procedure to integrate wind power generation on the power dispatch model currently used in Brazil. The article study the Brazilian Northeast region as it is where most of the wind power farms are located. Power demand forecasts are obtained via electricity consumption forecasts made using Autoregressive Distributed Lag – ADL models, considering macroeconomics perspectives to estimate it. To integrate wind power integration on the actual dispatch model, the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method – MCMC was used to simulate wind power generation and calculate the net power demand, which was considered in the dispatch model.