Solar Power Ramp Events Detection Using an Optimized Swinging Door Algorithm: Paper No. DETC2015-46849

Solar power ramp events (SPREs) significantly influence the integration of solar power on non-clear days and threaten the reliable and economic operation of power systems. Accurately extracting solar power ramps becomes more important with increasing levels of solar power penetrations in power systems. In this paper, we develop an optimized swinging door algorithm (OpSDA) to enhance the state of the art in SPRE detection. First, the swinging door algorithm (SDA) is utilized to segregate measured solar power generation into consecutive segments in a piecewise linear fashion. Then we use a dynamic programming approach to combine adjacent segments into significant ramps when the decision thresholds are met. In addition, the expected SPREs occurring in clear-sky solar power conditions are removed. Measured solar power data from Tucson Electric Power is used to assess the performance of the proposed methodology. OpSDA is compared to two other ramp detection methods: the SDA and the L1-Ramp Detect with Sliding Window (L1-SW) method. The statistical results show the validity and effectiveness of the proposed method. OpSDA can significantly improve the performance of the SDA, and it can perform as well as or better than L1-SW with substantially less computation time.