Statistical distribution for wind power forecast error and its application to determine optimal size of energy storage system

Accurate wind power forecast is an important tool for wind farm to participate in day-ahead or hours-ahead energy markets. However, forecast errors with any methodology are so large that they cannot be neglected. The forecast error needs to be analyzed individually for single wind farm to estimate the impact of this error on trading wind energy in electricity market. Although forecast error is always assumed as normal distribution, it can be demonstrated that it is not proper with a simple statistical analysis. In this paper, a mixed distribution is proposed based on laplace and normal distribution to model forecast errors associated with persistence forecast for single wind farm over multiple timescales. Then the proposed distribution is used to estimate the penalties for prediction errors in the electricity market. Energy storage system (ESS) can smooth the wind power output and make wind power more “dispatchable”. A probabilistic method is proposed to determine optimal size of ESS for wind farm in electricity markets. The results indicate that the proposed distribution and probabilistic method is efficient to find optimal size of ESS.