Impact of Correlation Between Wind Speed and Turbine Availability on Wind Farm Reliability

Abstract

This paper proposes a new method to evaluate the reliability of a wind farm considering the correlation between wind turbine reliability and wind speed. With increasing integration of wind generation into the grid, the reliability and stability of the grid are increasingly impacted. Although there are obvious benefits from wind generation, the stochastic nature of wind speed causes several operational challenges. Recent research has shown that wind speeds also impact the failure rates of the turbines, thereby compounding the effect of wind speed variation. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of wind speed on the reliability of a wind farm considering the correlation between wind speed and wind turbine failure rate. The method proposed in this paper is implemented using discrete convolution. The effectiveness of the proposed method is proved by comparing reliability indexes of the modified IEEE RTS-79 system with and without considering the impacts of the negative correlation between wind turbine reliability and wind speed.