Real-time optimization of wind farms and fixed-head pumped-storage hydro-plants

Abstract

Renewable energies and, in particular, wind power have come to the forefront in the electricity market in recent years. The main drawback of wind power generation, however, is the major difficulty in forecasting its production. For this reason, when wind farms go to the market, they are very often made to pay penalties for the deviations between forecasting and actual production. In this paper we shall analyse whether real-time compensation of wind power plant deviation penalties is profitable by means of the coordinated optimization of the wind power plant with a large pumped-storage hydro-plant. We shall model the pumped storage plant in great detail and make use of optimal control techniques to carry out the optimization. We shall analyse the most relevant recent papers on the subject and compare them with our technique. We shall also analyse another possible solution based on compensation carried out a posteriori, instead of in real time.