Unit Commitment and Probabilistic Reliability Assessment of Power Systems with Solar Generation

Solar cell generators (SCGs) offer a renewable and environmentally-friendly source for generating electricity. However, their intermittent nature affects power system reliability. This paper studies the effect of SCGs on power system reliability under various penetration levels. A unit commitment economic dispatch (UCED) model is developed to compute the expected generation output by taking into account normal and contingency operations of conventional generators (CGs) and the forecasted solar radiation and forced outage rates (FORs) of solar farms (SFs). The UCED is applied on a test system consisting of 10 CGs and different penetration levels of solar generation. Then, the expected SCGs power output and the forecasted load probabilistic model is inputted to the probabilistic production costing (PPC) method to assess reliability, compute projected production cost, and capacity credit for the SCGs.