Factors influencing calculation of capacity value of wind power: A case study of the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM)

Abstract

Calculation of wind power capacity values for risk assessment of power system adequacy has attracted great attention in the literature. And the most popular approach has been the Effective Load Carrying Capability (ELCC) method which allows for the consideration of key factors such as wind capacity factor, forced outage rates (F.O.R) of conventional power stations, system reliability targets, and the correlation between wind availability and system load. However, comparatively little attention has been paid to analysing the effects of other factors such as the number of wind farms and wind installed capacity, the length of historic time series data on demand and wind resources. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of how these factors influence the calculation of capacity value for the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM) power system using metered half-hourly wind and load data for 2006 to 2013. The analysis incorporates the periods with extreme risk events. Our results show that capacity values depend greatly on the design of the simulation model used, and highlight the importance of capturing wind and load data points relating to extremely high demand periods. We compare our NEM-wide estimates to recent estimates for the State of South Australia.