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 of wind turbine reliability and wind speed using discrete convolution. As the integration of wind generation into power system keeps increasing substantially, reliability and stability of wind farms output is getting a lot of attention. Although power systems get benefited from wind power integration, the stochastic nature of wind speed is a matter of concern. Wind speed not only impacts the wind turbine output in a direct manner, it also causes an effect on the failure rate and repair rate of wind turbines. The objective of the work in 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/repair 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.