Abstract

The power output from wind farms is highly volatile, uncertain and hard to be predicted accurately. Then sometimes positive short-run correlation between variations of wind power output and load could bring more and larger disturbances in the system operation, bringing reliability and economic concerns. The integration of wind power generators in power systems poses some challenges, and besides installing extra reserve capacities, transmission reinforcement or other advanced controls may be required to avoid transmission overloads or voltage problem induced by wind power variation. Moreover, a well-developed transmission network may need less reserve capacity for a given reliability level, providing incentives for the research of this paper. In this paper, an optimization & sensitivity method is proposed to identify the vulnerable area of the transmission system with large amount of wind integration. IEEE-57 bus system is used as the test system. Test cases with various objective functions and allocation of reserve capacity are designed and therefore different upgrade schemes are obtained by the method. Monte Carlo simulation is used for the reliability & economic evaluation of the test system with a group of indices, including a new index - entropy. Test results and comparison show the effective of the method, and also the potential of entropy for assessing the robust of the transmission network. © 2011 IEEE.