Application of Risk Evaluation to Renewable Energy Systems

While wind and solar energies provide new generation sources, additional operational risks have been also brought to power systems. This chapter discusses, in two separate sections, the risk evaluation methods for two special elements - wind turbine power converter system (WTPCS) and photovoltaic (PV) power system. In each section, establishing the relationship between the failure rates of electronic components and wind speed or insolation is a main thread. In the first section, a typical four-quadrant WTPCS with a permanent-magnet synchronous generator is used as an example to investigate the effects of wind speed and wind generator parameters on WTPCS risk. In the second section, a real life central-inverter PV system and an alternative design option with string inverter topologies are utilized to investigate the effects of various factors on the PV power system risk.