Adverse environmental impacts of carbon emissions are causing increasing concerns to the general public throughout the world. Electric energy generation from conventional energy sources is considered to be a major contributor to these harmful emissions. High emphasis is therefore being given to green alternatives of energy, such as wind and solar. Wind energy is being perceived as a promising alternative. This source of energy technology and its applications have undergone significant research and development over the past decade. As a result, many modern power systems include a significant portion of power generation from wind energy sources. The impact of wind generation on the overall system performance increases substantially as wind penetration in power systems continues to increase to relatively high levels. It becomes increasingly important to accurately model the wind behavior, the interaction with other wind sources and conventional sources, and incorporate the characteristics of the energy demand in order to carry out a realistic evaluation of system reliability. Power systems with high wind penetrations are often connected to multiple wind farms at different geographic locations. Wind speed correlations between the different wind farms largely affect the total wind power generation characteristics of such systems, and therefore should be an important parameter in the wind modeling process. This paper evaluates the effect of the correlation between multiple wind farms on the adequacy indices of wind-integrated systems. The paper also proposes a simple and appropriate probabilistic analytical model that incorporates wind correlations, and can be used for adequacy evaluation of multiple windintegrated systems. OPEN ACCESSAppl. Sci. 2013, 3 108

Environmental concerns caused by burning fossil fuel and the safety concerns associated with nuclear power plants have led to increased interest and investment in wind power. Wind penetration in power systems has been rapidly increasing worldwide and has resulted in increased variability and uncertainty in power generation. Proper modeling of the wind resource has, therefore, become increasingly important in modern wind-integrated power systems. The correlation between wind speeds at multiple wind farms considerably affects the overall variability of wind power generation. Many power utilities are considering expansion to multiple wind farms. Analysis of wind power at different sites requires sufficient time-synchronized wind data in order to incorporate their cross-correlations in the evaluation model. Such data are usually not available or very limited for many prospective wind sites that may be considered in energy planning or policy making. This paper proposes a simple analytical method to develop approximate wind models when time-synchronized wind data for two wind sites are not available and further extends the method to incorporate more than two wind sites.

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