Accommodation of curtailed wind power by electric water heaters based on a new hybrid prediction approach

Wind power curtailment is of great importance with the increase of large-scale wind power connected to the grid. A new concept of redundant wind power accommodated by dispatching electric water heaters (EWHs) is developed in the paper. Precise predictions of wind power and EWHs load power are the basis for this work. A hybrid multi-kernel prediction approach integrating an adaptive fruit fly optimization algorithm (AFOA) and multi-kernel relevance vector machine (MKRVM) is proposed to deal with the sample distribution of multisource heterogeneous features uncovered by an energy entropy method, where AFOA is used to determine the kernel parameters in MKRVM adaptively and avoid the arbitrariness. For the large computation of the prediction approach, parallel computation based on the Hadoop cluster is used to accelerate the calculation. Then, an economic dispatching model for accommodating wind power is built taking into account the penalty of curtailed wind power and the operating cost of EWHs. The proposed scheme is implemented in an intelligent residential district. The results show that the optimization performance of the hybrid prediction approach is superior to those of four usual optimization algorithms in this case. Regular or orderly scheduling of EWHs enables accommodation of superfluous wind power and reduces dispatch cost.