Flexible Operational Planning Framework Considering Multiple Wind Energy Forecasting Service Providers

While the state-of-the-art wind forecasting platforms use similar inputs, the techniques may vary substantially from one forecast service provider to another. No single forecast will apply optimally to all prediction horizons and site locations. Therefore, power system operators rely on several forecast service providers to hedge against the operational risk rising from the error in single-provider case. In order to accommodate the uncertainties in wind power forecast, each forecasting service provider will deliver multiple wind power output scenarios with different initial conditions and model formulations, and one commitment decision will be produced. The key issue of this research work is to identify which generation schedule is likely to perform better under various conditions or for different types of decisions. The selected plan may not be the optimal one for a particular scenario set, but it will lead to an overall lower cost if it needs to be changed to another plan as getting closer to real-time. Detailed case studies are given to demonstrate the performance of the proposed flexible operation planning framework. © 2010-2012 IEEE.