Determining and exploiting the distribution function of wind power forecasting error for the economic operation of autonomous power systems

Abstract

Many efforts have been presented in the bibliography for wind power forecasting in power systems and few of them have been used for autonomous power systems. The impact of knowing the distribution function of wind power forecasting error in the economic operation of a power system is studied in this paper. The papers proposes that the distribution of the wind power forecasting error of a specific tool can be easily derived if, for that model, an evaluation of its performance is made off-line comparing the forecasted values of the tool with the actual wind power values in the same horizon. The proposed methodology is applied to the autonomous power system of Crete. It is shown that the improvement of the performance of wind power forecasting tool has significant economic impact on the operation of autonomous power systems with increased wind power penetration. The obtained results for various levels of wind power production and load show that using only mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) leads to significant change in the estimation of the wind power to be shed to avoid technical limits violation, especially if the wind power forecasting tool presents underestimation of the actual production.