Optimal Placement of Wind Power Plant in a Radial Distribution Network Considering Plant Reliability

This paper proposes a new approach for optimal placement of wind farm (WF) in a radial distribution network (RDN) considering reliability aspect of the WF. Since Wind turbines (WTs) are prone to failure, forced outage (or random failure) of WTs are considered to find reliability of a WF while selecting its optimal placement in a RDN in this study. In this context one year wind profile data of a real life site, and time series demand data from a real distribution system have been considered. A non-sequential sampling strategy has been applied to sample the state (fail or active) of WTs considering 95% availability over a year for individual WT in the WF and a Monte Carlo simulation is developed to assess reliability of the WF for each position (bus) in the RDN. Multi-stage power flow (PF) with one hour time resolution for entire year is performed for each position of WF in the RDN. The best position of WF is selected based on placement of WF in the RDN for which minimum number of cases of bus voltage limit violation (<; 0.93 p.u.) occur and the aggregated electrical losses are least over 8760 hours (one year). The proposed approach is validated on IEEE 33 bus RDN system.