Wind energy forecasting can facilitate wind energy integration into a power system. In particular, the management of power system security would benefit from forecast information on plausible large, rapid change in wind power generation. Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) systems are presently the best available tools for wind energy forecasting for projection times between 3 and 48 hours. In this thesis, the types of weather phenomena that cause large, rapid changes in wind power in southeast Australia are classified using observations from three wind farms. The results show that the majority of events are due to horizontal propagation of spatial weather features. A study of NWP systems reveals that they are generally good at forecasting the broad large-scale weather phenomena but may misplace their location relative to the physical world. Errors may result from developing single time-series forecasts from a single NWP grid point, or from a single interpolation of proximate grid points. This thesis presents a new approach that displays NWP wind forecast information from a field of multiple grid points around the wind farm location. Displaying the NWP wind speeds at the multiple grid points directly would potentially be misleading as they each reflect the estimated local surface roughness and terrain at a particular grid point. Thus, a methodology was developed to convert the NWP wind speeds at the multiple grid points to values that reflect surface conditions at the wind farm site. The conversion method is evaluated with encouraging results by visual inspection and by comparing with an NWP ensemble. The multiple grid point information can also be used to improve downscaling results by filtering out data where there is a large chance of a discrepancy between an NWP time-series forecast and observations. The converted wind speeds at multiple grid points can be downscaled to site-equivalent wind speeds and transformed to wind farm power assuming unconstrained wind farm operation at one or more wind farm sites. This provides a visual decision support tool that can help a forecast user assess the possibility of large, rapid changes in wind power from one or more wind farms.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/242811 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Cutler, Nicholas Jeffrey, Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications, Faculty of Engineering, UNSW |
| Publisher | Publisher:University of New South Wales. Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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