Probabilistic security management for power system operations with large amounts of wind power

Abstract: Power systems are critical infrastructures for the society. They are therefore planned and operated to provide a reliable eletricity delivery. The set of tools and methods to do so are gathered under security management and are designed to ensure that all operating constraints are fulfilled at all times.During the past decade, raising awareness about issues such as climate change, depletion of fossil fuels and energy security has triggered large investments in wind power. The limited predictability of wind power, in the form of forecast errors, pose a number of challenges for integrating wind power in power systems. This limited predictability increases the uncertainty already existing in power systems in the form of random occurrences of contingencies and load forecast errors. It is widely acknowledged that this added uncertainty due to wind power and other variable renewable energy sources will require new tools for security management as the penetration levels of these energy sources become significant.In this thesis, a set of tools for security management under uncertainty is developed. The key novelty in the proposed tools is that they build upon probabilistic descriptions, in terms of distribution functions, of the uncertainty. By considering the distribution functions of the uncertainty, the proposed tools can consider all possible future operating conditions captured in the probabilistic forecasts, as well as the likeliness of these operating conditions. By contrast, today's tools are based on the deterministic N-1 criterion that only considers one future operating condition and disregards its likelihood.Given a list of contingencies selected by the system operator and probabilitistic forecasts for the load and wind power, an operating risk is defined in this thesis as the sum of the probabilities of the pre- and post-contingency violations of the operating constraints, weighted by the probability of occurrence of the contingencies.For security assessment, this thesis proposes efficient Monte-Carlo methods to estimate the operating risk. Importance sampling is used to substantially reduce the computational time. In addition, sample-free analytical approximations are developed to quickly estimate the operating risk. For security enhancement, the analytical approximations are further embedded in an optimization problem that aims at obtaining the cheapest generation re-dispatch that ensures that the operating risk remains below a certain threshold. The proposed tools build upon approximations, developed in this thesis, of the stable feasible domain where all operating constraints are fulfilled.