Forecasting & scheduling of wind and solar power plants
Student name: Mr Devesh Kumar
Guide: Mr Sapan Thapar
Year of completion: 2016
Host Organisation: REConnect Energy, Gurgaon
Supervisor (Host Organisation): Mr Vibhav Nuwal
Abstract: The electricity system in India is facing many challenges as the energy demand is expected to
grow many folds in the coming years and also looking at the current reserves of fossil fuels.
In order to keep pace with the electricity demand, renewable energy needs to be used
efficiently for supplementing the energy requirement of the country. This will also help our
country to reduce greenhouse gas emission. Current grid installed capacity of renewable
being at 38.28 GW (November 2015). Looking forward the ambitious target of the
government to add 175 GW of renewable energy by 2022, integration of such large sum of
RE power into the grid have many challenges, both technical and economic.
The Indian grid is currently the 5th largest in the world. Grid stability and maintaining power
quality is a challenging task in itself. One of the difficulties in grid management is being
variable generation from different RE sources such as wind and solar. Knowing the future
generation from renewable using power forecasting will help in gauging the future
generation.
Recently CERC has notified forecasting and scheduling regulation for inter-state sale of
power. Forum of Regulators (FoR) have come up with model regulation to facilitate largescale
grid integration of solar and wind generating stations while maintaining grid stability
and security as mentioned under the Grid Code, through forecasting, scheduling and
commercial mechanism for deviation settlement of these generators. Grid balancing lays
emphasis on the tools used and methods followed to mitigate the effects of wind and solar
variability for day-ahead and intra-day. Forecasting is necessary to minimise deviations
between schedule and actual generation of power at sub-station level.
Performance analysis is another section of the project where analysing the forecast and
actual generation of a particular wind or solar plant. It also includes calculating error
deviation % between actual and scheduled generation. As per model regulation, the error %
should be within 15%, otherwise it will draw penalty from the RE generator.
This approach will help to deal with the immediate concerns of balancing RE sources and
also will help in planning the future outlook. The overall objective is to avoid frequency
deviation arising out of RE integration.
