Wind Power Impacts on Electric Power System Operating Costs: Summary and Perspective on Work to Date; Preprint
Electric utility system planners and operators are concerned that variations in wind plant output may increase the operating costs of the system. This concern arises because the system must maintain an instantaneous balance between the aggregate demand for electric power and the total power generated by all power plants feeding the system. This is a highly sophisticated task that utility operators and automatic controls perform routinely, based on well-known operating characteristics for conventional power plants and a great deal of experience accumulated over many years. System operators are concerned that variations in wind plant output will force the conventional power plants to provide compensating variations to maintain system balance, thus causing the conventional power plants to deviate from operating points chosen to minimize the total cost of operating the system. The operators' concerns are compounded by the fact that conventional power plants are generally under their control and thus are dispatchable, whereas wind plants are controlled instead by nature. Although these are valid concerns, the key issue is not whether a system with a significant amount of wind capacity can be operated reliably, but rather to what extent the system operating costs are increased by the variability of the wind.
- Research Organization:
- National Renewable Energy Lab., Golden, CO. (US)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- US Department of Energy (US)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC36-99-GO10337
- OSTI ID:
- 15007092
- Report Number(s):
- NREL/CP-500-35946; TRN: US200414%%99
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Conference title not supplied, Conference location not supplied, Conference dates not supplied; Other Information: PBD: 1 Mar 2004; Related Information: Prepared for the 2004 Global WINDPOWER Conference, 29-31 March 2004, Chicago, Illinois
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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