The impact of wind power geographical smoothing on operating reserve requirements

As one of the common sources of renewable energy generation worldwide, wind power is the subject of numerous academic and industrial studies. The impact of the wind generation on different aspects of power system operations is extensively addressed in the literature. One of the important aspects of such studies is related to the dynamics of the wind generation that emerges when the wind turbines are arranged into arrays. Arranging wind turbines into arrays alters the output wind generation due to the emerging coupling between wind turbines and the geographical smoothing. While the impact of the coupling between wind turbines on the output magnitudes is well studied, the impact of geographical distribution of turbines on wind power variability has received little attention. Moreover, the impact of the geographical smoothing on the operating reserve requirements is omitted. This paper develops a mathematical framework that relates the variability of the wind farm output to the geographical distribution of wind turbines. The proposed method is used to study the impact of the geographical distribution on the requirements of three types of operating reserves, namely, load following, ramping and regulation. The results show that the geographical distribution reduces all three types of operating reserve requirements.