Availability - Based Wind Farm Design

The paper develops a methodology for the optimal sizing of a generic wind farms, focusing primarily on reliability aspects, besides the traditional economic ones. A specific objective function is proposed in order to select the better wind farm configuration, based upon the profits related to the economic trading in the deregulated electric market and the costs due to investment, operation & management, and to system unavailability. This objective function is accurately investigated as a function of the turbines number in order to derive the most convenient alternative, which implies also the optimal choice of the single wind generators size. The ranking coming out from this assessment is then compared with that one established in terms of expected load not supplied. A compromise choice, between the best alternatives provided by the two criteria has finally adopted. A simple numerical application is reported in the last part of the paper for testing the validity of the proposed approach. Also uncertainty aspects in the basic input parameters are taken into account and possible way of dealing with them is briefly illustrated.