Methodology for monitoring, control and operation of power systems with wind farms

This paper presents an infrastructure and a monitoring and control approach for systems with wind farms that enables coordination of the operation of wind farms with the bulk power system and maximizes the utilization of the available wind energy at the wind farm locations. A hierarchical optimization scheme is proposed in this work. In particular, a system level optimization defines the optimal operating point for the wind farms, the thermal generating units and other controllable devices in the system. At each wind farm, a lower level optimization procedure is performed which defines the operating condition of each wind turbine at the wind farm. The proposed infrastructure is enabled by a distributed state estimation procedure that evaluates the real time model of the system and the wind farms, used by the hierarchical optimization scheme, continuously with speeds of 60 times per second.