Comprehensive Regulation Benefits of Hydropower Generation System in Reducing Wind Power Fluctuation

The use of renewable energy has become a necessity to generate electricity, and is taking the place of conventional coal-fired power, as it has clear economic and environmental benefits. The purpose of this paper is to quantify the comprehensive benefits of hydropower in reducing wind power fluctuation in a hybrid coal-fired/hydro/wind power system. To achieve this, a wind–hydropower generation system must be established, and its complementary characteristic is also illustrated based on the resultant wind speed. Then, based on Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 14 Bus Power System, coal-fired generation is introduced to model a final hybrid integrated power system. The comprehensive benefit evaluation method, including the power consumption profit, the peak load profit, the energy conservation profit, the guide vane fatigue cost, the maintenance cost, and the start-stop cost, is presented to assess the join operation benefits of the wind/hydropower/coal-fired integrated system. The complementary investigation shows that the hydropower system has an excellent effect on suppressing wind power fluctuation, although the fatigue damage of hydraulic guide vanes is a little severe for the time scale of hours, compared with that of seconds. The quantified benefit shows that the increased power consumption profit, the increased guide vane fatigue loss cost, the decreased peak-load profit, and the increased energy conservation profit are RMB 1262.43 million/year, RMB 0.37 million/year, RMB 333.97 million/year and RMB 0.54 million/year, with the wind and hydropower ratio increasing from 16% to 25%, which directly leads to the annual total revenue increasing to RMB 143.2673 million. The implementation of this paper can contribute to making more efficient use of wind-hydro power in conventional electricity production.