Dispatch for Smart Grid with Intermittent Wind Power

From electricity supply side, power providers’ electricity energy is assumed to comprise two parts: one is procured from the wholesale market/national power grid, and the other is produced by their own wind generations. From electricity demand side, we assume two categories of energy users, namely traditional energy users and opportunistic energy users. Taking a unit time into account, this paper models the profits of power providers as a stochastic programming problem with three system parameters to be determined, i.e., the electricity procurement, the day-ahead price corresponding to traditional energy users and the real-timeprice corresponding to opportunistic energy users. Our objective is to maximize providers’ profits while preserving the balance between electricity supply and demand. To solve this problem, we first convert the stochastic programming problem into a nonlinear programming problem with constraint conditions; we then solve it using standard nonlinear optimization methods. With our proposed model, power provider can not only maximize the profits, but also can easily achieve the tradeoff between the profits of the power providers and the penetration of wind energy by tuning the system parameters. Numerical results show our proposed method can potentially benefit both power providers and energy users.

The growing interest in the design of smart grids is driven by the desire to integrate volatile renewable energy resources, such as wind, solar, bio-fuel, and geothermal energy, into existing power systems. In the past decades, wind energy has received more attention than other renewable sources. This is due to the fact that, after the initial land and capital costs, there is essentially no cost involved in the production of power; moreover, the wind energy is generally reckoned to be environmentally friendlier than the impacts of thermal energy sources. For modern power systems with wind generation, the challenges, to a large extent, originate from the uncertainties both on the supply side and the demand side.