  High wind energy penetration critically challenges the economic dispatch of
current and future power systems. Supply and demand must be balanced at every
bus of the grid, while respecting transmission line ratings and accounting for
the stochastic nature of renewable energy sources. Aligned to that goal, a
network-constrained economic dispatch is developed in this paper. To account
for the uncertainty of renewable energy forecasts, wind farm schedules are
determined so that they can be delivered over the transmission network with a
prescribed probability. Given that the distribution of wind power forecasts is
rarely known, and/or uncertainties may yield non-convex feasible sets for the
power schedules, a scenario approximation technique using Monte Carlo sampling
is pursued. Upon utilizing the structure of the DC optimal power flow (OPF), a
distribution-free convex problem formulation is derived whose complexity scales
well with the wind forecast sample size. The efficacy of this novel approach is
evaluated over the IEEE 30-bus power grid benchmark after including real
operation data from seven wind farms.
