Improvement of the power system reliability by prediction of wind power generation

The integration of wind farms into the electricity grid has become an important challenge for the utilization and control of electric power systems, because of the fluctuating and intermittent behaviour of wind power generation. Wind power predictions improve the economical and technical integration of large capacities of wind energy into the existing electricity grid. Trading, balancing, grid operation and safety increase the importance of forecasting electrical outputs from wind farms. Thus wind power forecast systems have to be integrated into the control room of the transmission system operator (TSO). Very high requirements of reliability and safety make this integration especially challenging. The pooling of several large offshore wind farms into clusters in the GW range will make new options feasible for an optimized integration of wind power. The geographically distributed onshore wind farms will be aggregated to clusters, for the purpose of operating these wind farms as one large (virtual) wind power plant. For this purpose, a new structure, the wind farm cluster will be introduced. All wind farms, which are directly or indirectly connected to one transmission network node will be associated to one wind farm cluster. The wind farm cluster manager (WCM) assists the TSO by operating the cluster according to the requirements of the power transmission system. Non-controllable wind farms within a wind farm cluster are supported by controllable ones.