This paper proposes a new method to find the capacity of a future wind farm regarding several limits of the grid system: voltage stability limits, thermal limits, voltage limits, load tap changing limitation and generator power output limitation. The method combines the optimization method and a probabilistic analysis to maximize the number of the wind turbines subject to those limits. Two types of wind farms are modeled in this paper: fixed speed wind farms and variable speed wind farms. It is concluded that the proposed method is a fast and accurate method to deal with the uncertainty of wind energy in the planning of wind farm capacity. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.