Variability Reduction of Wind Power using Aggregation and Energy Storage

Integration of wind energy into the grid poses serious challenges to the system reliability due to its intermittent nature. Variability of wind can be mitigated using various methods including deployment of energy storage systems (ESS), aggregation of geographically diverse wind, and the use of flexible loads. This paper proposes a novel method for reducing the variability of wind power by both deploying ESS and aggregating geographically diverse wind production. Although the aggregation of geographically diverse wind can reduce its intermittency to some extent, the benefits of this approach are limited due to a number of factors which are discussed in this paper. ESS, on the other hand, have been widely used for variability mitigation of wind and achieving reliability targets. However, ESS projects are expensive. In this context, this paper studies the impact of reliability enhancement of a system and the reduction in storage size by aggregating wind power from geographically diverse wind farms. The proposed approach is validated by performing sequential Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) using the IEEE Reliability Test System data. Results show that aggregation of geographically diverse wind can significantly reduce the size of ESS required for improving the reliability of the system.