Alerting to Rare Large-Scale Ramp Events in Wind Power Generation

Abstract

Wind power is an unstable power source, as its output fluctuates drastically according to the weather. Such instability can cause sudden large-scale changes in output, called ramp events; the frequency of such events is relatively low throughout the year but they could negatively affect the supply-demand balance in a power system. This study focuses on an alerting scheme of wind power ramp events for a transmission system operator to support operational decisions on cold reserve power plants. The ramp alerting scheme is implemented from the viewpoint of supervised learning by using the prediction results of wind power output. In particular, the authors address the class imbalance problem, as the accuracy of ramp event prediction tends to be low because of the infrequency of such ramp events in the database used for learning. In this study, several data sampling strategies are proposed and implemented to overcome the problem in the ramp alert task. The effectiveness of the proposed data sampling framework is evaluated experimentally by predicting real-world wind power ramps, based on a dataset collected in Japan. The experimental results show that the proposed framework effectively improves the ramp alert accuracy by addressing the class imbalance problem.

The Impact of Global Warming on Wind Energy Resources and Ramp Events in Japan

“…Understanding the impacts of global warming on the wind power sector is important for future energy management in Japan. In addition to forecasting the short-term variability of wind power output [13][14][15], evaluating wind power potential is an important subject in wind power management [3,9,10,54,55] since this significantly affects the cost of wind energy [8]. While these impacts have been paid increasing attention recently, they are still not well understood.…”

“…Sudden large increases and decreases in wind energy output over a short period, caused by wind speed fluctuations, are known as wind ramp events and are one of the dominant problems in wind energy [11][12][13][14][15]. These occur often in Japan because of geographic/climatological conditions that affect the load generation balance of the electricity supply.…”

Designing Sustainable Smart Cities: Cooperative Energy Management Systems and Applications

“…In particular, the ramp, that is, a sudden change in the amount of power generation depending on weather and wind conditions, is a phenomenon in which characteristics peculiar to renewable energy ‡ Data collected by Himawari-8 comprise solar radiation information with spatial resolution of 1 km collected every 2.5 min. appear remarkably, and prediction approaches targeting the ramp events have been actively studied for the last decade [109][110][111][112]. Meanwhile, in recent years, the uncertainty of the demand that differs from the past is increasing in accordance with the popularization of a new type of energy appliances, diversification of life patterns and change in energy awareness [113].…”

Forecasting of Wind Capacity Ramp Events Using Typical Event Clustering Identification

“…However, due to the intermittency of wind resources, large-scale wind farm power output can be severely affected by weather and operation constraints. Thus, ramp events are defined to describe dramatic wind power fluctuations in the short term [2], [3]. They may seriously threaten the security of power systems, particularly steam turbines, and generators which have strict ramp constraints [4], [5].…”