Embedding Dependencies Between Wind Farms in Uncertainty-Aware Optimal Power Flow

The increasing share of renewables in the electricity generation mix comes along with an increasing uncertainty in power supply. In the recent years, distributionally robust optimization has gained significant interest due to its ability to make informed decisions under uncertainty, which are robust to misrepresentations of the distributional information (e.g., from probabilistic forecasts). This is achieved by introducing an ambiguity set that describes the potential deviations from an empirical distribution of all uncertain parameters. However, this set typically overlooks the inherent dependencies of uncertainty, e.g., spatial dependencies of weather-dependent energy sources. This paper goes beyond the state of the art by embedding such dependencies within the definition of the ambiguity set. In particular, we propose a new copula-based ambiguity set which is tailored to capture any type of dependencies. The resulting problem is reformulated as a conic model which is kept generic such that it can be applied to any decision-making problem under uncertainty in power systems. Given the Optimal Power Flow (OPF) problem as one of the main potential applications, we illustrate the performance of our proposed distributionally robust model applied to i) a DC-OPF problem for a meshed transmission system and ii) an AC-OPF problem using LinDistFlow approximation for a radial distribution system. Both applications consider a high share of renewables.