Integrating Southwest Power Pool Wind to Southeast Electricity ...

The study team determined that any scenario where wind from SPP was moved into the SERC
study region would most likely have the wind plants serving each region distributed across the
footprint. This served to maximize the aggregation benefits for each region. The effects of
aggregation are discussed in the next section.
A prior study performed for SPP selected which plants would be used to meet the 20% energy
target for SPP. These same plants were utilized for SPP in this study. To assign plants to
Entergy, Southern Company and TVA, random selections were made from the list of plants until
each region’s energy target was met. The plants were assigned to their respective regions and
that assignment was carried through into the production cost modeling. Figure 3-2 shows the
results of that process. The aggregate statistics from wind production from these plants is
presented in the Wind Characteristics section.
Figure 3-2
Assignment of wind plants to regions
Effect of Aggregation of Wind Plants
As the number of plants and particularly the geographic diversity of those plants increases, the
variability of the output of the aggregated plants decreases. As noted, the wind plants selected
to comprise the wind generation for each of the regions in the study were selected to provide
geographic diversity. This has several consequences. Given the set of wind plants and the
geographic area covered, this minimizes the variability seen for each of the regions. A different
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