abstract: As the world embraces a sustainable energy future, alternative energy resources, such as wind power, are increasingly being seen as an integral part of the future electric energy grid. Ultimately, integrating such a dynamic and variable mix of generation requires a better understanding of renewable generation output, in addition to power grid systems that improve power system operational performance in the presence of anticipated events such as wind power ramps. Because of the stochastic, uncontrollable nature of renewable resources, a thorough and accurate characterization of wind activity is necessary to maintain grid stability and reliability. Wind power ramps from an existing wind farm are studied to characterize persistence forecasting errors using extreme value analysis techniques. In addition, a novel metric that quantifies the amount of non-stationarity in time series wind power data was proposed and used in a real-time algorithm to provide a rigorous method that adaptively determines training data for forecasts. Lastly, large swings in generation or load can cause system frequency and tie-line flows to deviate from nominal, so an anticipatory MPC-based secondary control scheme was designed and integrated into an automatic generation control loop to improve the ability of an interconnection to respond to anticipated large events and fluctuations in the power system. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 2016