Committing Electrical Power Units Taking into Account Wind Sources

The large integration of wind energy into electrical systems poses important challenges to the power operators in the scheduling of the production and in the management of the network. This leads to the necessity to modify the current industry procedures, such as the Unit Commitment (UC) and the Economic Dispatch (ED), to take into account large amounts of wind power production. Even if an exhaustive literature exists on the general Unit Commitment problem, devoted on how to improve its mathematical formulation and its solution algorithm, the research that considers the Unit Commitment problem with wind generators is limited. In this work, a new Unit commitment model in presence of wind energy resources has been defined and analyzed, in order to formulate and solve the problem of determining the best configuration (optimal mix) of available thermal, hydro and wind power plants, taking into account proper emission considerations and the risk associated with the use of wind turbines.