Impact of Uncertainty on Wind Power Curtailment Estimation

Ireland and other countries in the EU have binding targets for production of energy from renewable sources by 2020. Ireland’s Renewable Energy Action Plan aims to meet this target by producing 40% of electrical energy from renewable sources and most of this will come from wind power. In order to forecast the amount of wind power capacity required, it is necessary to forecast the amount of wind power curtailment that will arise from the need to maintain a certain amount of conventional generation online to provide system services such as reserve, inertia and system balance. Estimation of future levels of wind power curtailment is also necessary for investors. In this paper, a stochastic scheduling model is used to study the impact of forecast error related uncertainty on wind power curtailment estimation. Results are shown illustrating the impact of uncertainty on final energy production from wind power and the impact improvements in forecasting could have on these estimates. Keywords—variable renewables; wind power; stochastic scheduling;