The National Institute of Wind Energy (NIWE) will provide wind forecasting services to Tamil Nadu’s state-owned electricity generation and distribution utility, TANGEDCO. With precise estimates of how much wind power would be available in the 96 fifteen-minute intervals of the following day, TANGEDCO will be able to handle fickle wind power better—as a consequence of which the state could accommodate more wind power.

The decision that NIWE (formerly, Centre for Wind Energy Technology) would provide forecasting services to TANGEDCO was announced formally today at a function held at the NIWE premises here.

K Boopathi, Additional Director and Head of Wind Resource Assessment Unit at NIWE, said that the institute would gather data about wind forecast from various wind farms in the state and arrive at wind power generation estimates for the following day.

Wind farms, which generate the primary data, are allowed to fine-tune their forecasts within three-hour blocks of the day. Once TANGEDCO knows how much wind power is expected to flow into the grid, it could have other power units either flex up or flex down generation. Gas and hydro based units are capable of such quick switch-on, switch-off.

Of the 23,000 MW of wind power in the country, Tamil Nadu has about 7,200 MW. The state electricity distributor has been struggling to handle such large amounts of wind power, the generation of which solely depends upon wind flows and hence somewhat unpredictable. Because of this, the state has not added much wind power capacity in the last couple of years. But forecasting would empower TANGEDCO to handle more wind capacity, experts said.

First time state-wide

Wind power forecast was made mandatory for wind farms of more than 10 MW capacity even two years back by the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC), with stiff penalties for waywardness beyond 30 per cent of the forecasts. This generated a howl of protests from the wind industry and the Commission deferred the application of the ‘scheduling and forecasting’ to a later date.

Ever since, wind farms have been doing ‘scheduling and forecasting’ at individual unit level, but this is the first time the exercise is being attempted on a state-wide basis.

Wind industry players argue that this is the way to do it. Madhusudhan Khemka, Chairman of the Indian Wind Turbine Manufacturers’ Association, says that forecasting is best done by a single agency—perhaps the State Load Despatch Centres—with inputs from individual wind machines.

On the question of penalty—whenever it comes into force—Boopathi said that it was yet to be decided as to who would be liable. However, he observed that disaggregated data would show which wind units were responsible for forecasts going awry, and those wind farms would be penalised.

Boopathi said that other states, notably Rajasthan, also showed interest in availing themselves of the forecasting services of NIWE.

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