By taking subsidies out of the picture, wind farm operators (WFO) face new challenges to participate in electricity markets. While conventional producers benefit from dispatchable generation, wind farms with stochastic nature have a challenging job to compete with these players in the market and need to come up with alternative solutions. To this end, energy storage has a great potential in managing the volatile generation and thereby increasing the profit of WFOs. Moreover, the gas market opens new opportunities to improve the flexibilities of WFOs in addressing the incurred penalties due to deviation between prediction and generation. For the sake of practicality, this paper proposes a joint operation-planning model. The WFO bids in both the day-ahead electricity market and gas market while also investing in alternative facilities, including electrical energy storage, gas storage, power-to-gas (P2G), and gas-to-power (G2P). The proposed framework is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model. To guarantee to find the global solution, the original MINLP model is recast into a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model. Several case studies are defined to capture the potential of the proposed framework on the profit of the WFO, scrutinizing the performance of different facilities and interactions with the aforementioned markets. The modeling provides a tool for the WFOs for considering different alternative approaches to deal with the uncertainty of generation. This includes storing the wind farm surplus generation directly into electrical energy storage or by converting this surplus into gas via P2G and either storing it in gas storage or selling it in the gas market. Moreover, under the lack of generation condition, the electrical energy storage can provide electricity, or the gas from the gas market and gas storage can turn to electricity through G2P to assist WFOs. Results show the effectiveness of the proposed framework in enhancing the profitability of wind farms via different alternatives while highlighting the role of the gas market as a promising solution.INDEX TERMS Electricity market, electrical energy storage, gas storage, gas-to-power, gas market, operation and planning, power-to-gas, wind farm. NOMENCLATUREA. Indexes

This paper tackles the challenges of offshore wind farm owners participating in the electricity market, aiming at maximizing their profit. Decreasing the subsidies, which used to support the wind farm owners in increasing the penetration of wind-based generation, resulted in new challenges. The owners need to compete not only with each other but also with the existing conventional producers in the electricity market. In this work, in order to have a more practical model, the day-ahead and balancing markets are considered. Moreover, the impact of energy storage devices on the profit of wind farm owners is also investigated. The stochastic programming approach is used to handle the existing uncertainties in the output power of the wind farm, and the day-ahead and balancing market prices. Four different case studies are conducted to analyze the potential of the proposed model. Results show the effectiveness of considering the day-ahead and balancing markets jointly by increasing the profit of windfarms owners. Moreover, the storage device highly increases the degree of freedom in participating in different electricity markets.

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The structure of the day-ahead electricity market obliges wind farm owners (WFOs) to make commitments hours before delivery. Due to the uncertainty of wind generation, WFOs bid in the electricity market with the prediction of its generation that, more often than not, is different from the actual generation. Therefore, WFOs experience deviations between their commitment to the electricity market and the actual generation, namely overproduction and underproduction, which are subject to penalties. This paper investigates solutions to decrease such deviation and increase the profit of the WFO. To this end, the joint planning and operation of electrical energy storage (EES) and power-to-gas (P2G) units to be paired with wind farms are evaluated while considering both the electricity and gas markets. Two case studies, with only EES and with both the EES and P2G units, are conducted to reveal the potential of the proposed approach, while risk analyses are performed to study the impact of different risk criteria on the decisions of WFO. This problem is formulated as an MINLP and then recast into MILP to obtain global solutions. Results offer the best strategies for WFOs to enhance their profit under the existing uncertain conditions.

Decarbonization of the energy sector requires further wind farms for electricity generation. Green hydrogen can assist in many aspects, such as overcoming the uncertainty of wind generation. In this study, the concept of a virtual power plant (VPP), including a wind farm, electrical energy storage, powerto-hydrogen, hydrogen-to-power, and gas network, is investigated to exploit the full potential of wind farms. The gas network will play the role of virtual green hydrogen storage for the wind farm operator (WFO). The WFO interacts with two main electricity markets, namely the day-ahead electricity market, to sell the major share of production, and the balancing electricity market, to handle the deviations. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed model in decreasing the deviations of WFOs to deliver the required electrical power committed to the electricity market, thus increasing their profit. Moreover, sensitivity analyses performed on the conversion ratio of the power-to-hydrogen show that the profit of WFO will increase with improvement in this parameter.