Search

Abstract Although the integration of large–scale clean wind power will have a positive impact on the environment deterioration and reduce the fossil fuel depletion, it also creates challenges for power system operations. Considering that some countries, such as China, hold a geographical advantage of adjacent distributions of wind and coal resources, i.e., the windy areas are located/close to the areas with vast coal reserves, one feasible plan of both utilizing the large–scale wind power and alleviating the operation burden of power systems is to build bundled wind–thermal generation systems (BWTGSs). This paper first gives the optimal BWTGSs (investment) planning method, in which the cost changing rules, the candidate scheme formation, and long–term wind–thermal coordinated generation scheduling simulation are introduced. Then based on different compensation purposes or requirements, four transmission power modes, i.e., constant transmission power mode, thermal–generation–smoothed transmission power mode, transmission power mode considering load pattern of receiving system, and sectioned transmission power mode, are proposed. Finally, numerical studies are conducted. Planning results show that the generator schemes, total costs, and clean energy proportions differ when adopting different transmission modes, and the sectioned transmission power mode is the most desirable mode with the lowest total planning cost and the highest clean energy proportion. Highlights • An optimal model for bundled wind–thermal generation system planning is presented. • Four transmission power (TP) modes for bundled generation system are proposed. • Optimal planning results for different TP modes are calculated and compared. • Sectioned TP mode leads to the lowest total cost and highest clean energy proportion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integration of large-scale wind power creates challenges for power system operations. One of the effective ways of dealing with these challenges is to build thermal power plants to form bundled wind–thermal generation system (BWTGS), i.e., using thermal power to alleviate the fluctuation of wind power. This paper presents a method for optimal capacity and type planning of BWTGS with the given wind farms. Branch-descending technique (BDT) is used to generate candidate schemes of thermal generating units by analyzing the rules of total cost changing with the reduction of the number of thermal generating units. The optimal scheme of BWTGS can be obtained by simulating a long-term operation process of BWTGS and comparing the total costs of all schemes. Techniques to accelerate computation, such as combining redundant states in dynamic programming (DP) algorithm and the saving-branch-cost technique in BDT, are developed to reduce the computational complexity. The major advantage of the proposed method is that it can be used to obtain not only the optimal capacity of thermal generating units, but also the optimal type and number of thermal generating units. Case studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]