At its current size, the integration of wind power in the United States has had little impact on the reliability and operations of the bulk power system. However, the trend in new installations of generation has gone decidedly to wind power. With state renewable portfolio goals as high as supplying 33% of total energy consumed, the variability and uncertainty of wind power can drastically impact system adequacy and security.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation and regional reliability organizations have developed reliability standards that balancing areas must meet during the day-to-day scheduling and dispatch of generation in meeting load. There has been a great deal of research focused on assessing wind power contributions to system adequacy and predicting the impacts of large installations of wind power on system security. Optimization research has focused on the daily operations of balancing areas to minimize fuel and operating costs while meeting reliability standards, yet little research has tried to apply metrics of reliability in optimizing the selection of wind farm sites.

In this thesis, minimizing wind power's impacts on system adequacy and security is accomplished through the optimal selection of wind farms from a geographically diverse pool of potential sites. The main contributions of this thesis are two portions of the optimization model. A new formulation is presented to optimize the aggregate capacity credit of selected wind farm sites using adequacy assessment metrics of Peak Load Carrying Capacity and Loss of Load Expectation reliability standards. Also included is a methodology to minimize the variance of selected sites to reduce the capacity and ramping capabilities required of generation and reserves to maintain reliable system operations.

The resulting multi-objective optimization model can be used to generate tradeoff curves between different impacts of wind on hourly, load-following, and regulating timescales. These Pareto optimal tradeoffs will allow planners to assess a range of optimal solutions based upon varying impacts on of system operations. Additionally, extensions to the model are discussed, including the conversion of wind installations and operations to functions of cost, as well as the incorporation of transmission interconnection and the decommissioning of unneeded conventional generators.