TABLE OF CONTENTS The following discussion also focuses on wind energy sources as a continuation of Section 7.8. However, all the principles apply equally to all generation sources that have been modelled in a way that creates an appropriate generation capacity outage probability table. This may have been obtained using conventional techniques assuming independence (gas, oil, etc) or using the approach described in Section 7.8 for intermittent sources (wind, solar, etc).
As discussed in Section 7.4.1, faults in the distribution network are frequently the most important cause of unavailability to customers accounting often for more than 80% of the time without service. Most wind farms are connected to distribution networks because their sizes do not justify investment in a high voltage connection to the grid. As the best wind resources are normally found in remote areas, they are usually connected to weak (radial) distribution networks. Therefore the combination of these two factors may pose limitations to the maximum expected output of the wind plant. Questions then arise about the effects of network reinforcement and of different operational policies on the ability to extract energy from the wind plant, on the benefit derived by customers, on the impact on the next voltage level and normal supply of energy, etc. Answers to these questions can only be objectively given from a reliability assessment of the distribution network containing the wind generation.
The conventional approach [12] to evaluating distribution system reliability is a load point orientated one based on minimal cut set...
