Firm energy of wind farms and its influence on hydraulic generation system

This paper presents a new methodology to evaluate the firm energy of wind plants into hydro electrical systems. As the level of the wind power generation has been increasing in Brazilian system, the reservoirs of hydro plants must adapt their water storage strategy to accommodate the wind power variation. As consequence, a new optimization signal should be available to allow a better operation scheduling of the independent system operator. The proposed approach is formulated using a linear program to evaluate and analyze the firm energy of both wind and hydro power plants. The Paranaiba power river system and the wind farms of Cidreira-1 and Miassaba-3 were used to show the main results and to discuss the proposed approach. The results have shown that the amount of wind penetration in the hydraulic generation system has very little impact on the firm energy of the hydro-plants, nevertheless high wind penetration caused a slight shift on the system's critical period.