The benefits of ICT for wind power integration demonstrated in the DISPOWER project

With an installed wind power capacity of about 36 GW as of mid 2005 and a significant growth expected for the next years, Europe is well on the way towards the target of 60 GW wind power by 2010. However, from the viewpoint of power systems operators significant progress in research and development is needed to deal with the intermittency of wind power for a reliable and economic integration into electrical power systems and markets. In response to this need, the European project DISPOWER has investigated and developed new Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-based tools for the secure integration of wind power into electrical system operation. In particular, a secured communication platform allowing electricity industry stakeholders having to deal with wind energy to share information related to wind energy has been implemented. This "virtual platform" is a database receiving and storing different data important for the integration of wind energy. One of the key data included in this database is the wind power output forecast produced by high-performance prediction methods (Day-ahead to 1-hour ahead) with errors reduced down to 5% (NRMSE). A number of applications to be plugged to this virtual platform have also been developed. A real-time reserve power optimisation method to support system operator dispatching a large amount of wind energy has been realized. A method based on genetic algorithm has also been implemented to solve economic dispatch computation, i.e. to evaluate the best power plant scheduling with respect to the operation cost and the CO₂ emission.