Study on variability smoothing benefits of wind farm cluster

Abstract

Smoothing effect is an important characteristic of large scale wind power. In this paper we analyze thesmoothing effect from the prospect of output variability. Specifically, the aggregated output variability of a wind farmcluster may be significantly lower than that of an independent wind farm, and this phenomenon is referred to as thevariability smoothing effect. In order to quantitatively analyze the variability smoothing effect, this paper introduces theconcept of variability costs and evaluates the variability costs of each wind farm and overall wind farm cluster based onan optimal scheduling model. It is found that the variability cost of a wind farm cluster as a whole is lower than the sumof variability costs of all wind farms. Moreover, the difference between wind farm cluster variability cost and the sum ofvariability costs of each wind farm is termed the variability smoothing benefit. Meanwhile, the Shapley value method isdeployed to equitably allocate the variability smoothing benefits of the wind farm cluster. The results indicate that thecombined wind farms have the additional benefits of reducing variability costs as well as encouraging the integration oflarge scale wind farms.