As the wind industry establishes itself as a substantial part of the United States’ energy portfolio, many Americans are left wondering how the power grid is able to utilize this variable resource. The magazine, Energy Biz and the blog, Solve Climate both address the issue in their May publications.  Ken Pennock, Forecasting Business Manager at AWS Truewind, explains that wind power forecasting is an essential tool for integrating wind onto the electricity grid.  Forecasting gives confidence to ISOs and RTOs when scheduling wind energy in their balancing area and brings with it a higher level of system reliability:

Historically, the power supply that is putting energy on the grid is a solid stream of  resource. You burn coal to make electricity, and when you need more, you burn  more coal, Pennock says.  In the case of wind, it’s a variable resource. We need to be able to predict when the wind will blow and when the wind turbines will spin and produce energy to put that power on the grid. If we have renewable energy like wind-producing power, we need to ramp down the fossil fuel sources so we don’t have too much power on the grid. When wind power goes down, we need to make sure other sources get spun back up in order to prevent blackouts and brownouts (Solve Climate).

The largest problems plant operators face in controlling wind energy is a ramp event. ‘“Most concerns are with a ramp event, either up or down…,’Pennock said. Probabilistic models are provided to operators that will, for instance, indicate that there might be a 15 percent chance of a ramp event in a given hour in the forecast” (Energy Biz). With this detailed forecasting, energy is able to be delivered without blackouts.

With 25 years of experience, AWS Truewind’s eWind® forecasting service has continuously become more precise, and customizable. The firm is currently forecasting for over 14, 000 MW of installed wind in North America which places the firm as the top forecasting provider on the continent.

The full text of both articles reference “Managing Wind Risk”, appearing in the May/June 2009 issue of Energy Biz and “Technology Takes on Wind Power’s Biggest Challenge: Predictability,” appearing on the blog  Solve Climate.