Antje Orths

Experience From Wind Integration in Some High Penetration Areas

The amount of wind power in the world is increasing quickly. The background for this development is improved technology, decreased costs for the units, and increased concern regarding environmental problems of competing technologies such as fossil fuels. The amount of wind power is not spread equally over the world, so in some areas, there is comparatively a high concentration. The aims of this paper are to overview some of these areas, and briefly describe consequences of the increase in wind power. The aim is also to try to draw some generic conclusions, in order to get some estimation about what will happen when the amount of wind power increases for other regions where wind power penetration is expected to reach high values in future

Where the wind blows

The power systems in Denmark, Spain, Ireland, and New Zealand have some of the highest wind penetrations in the world. The management of the different power systems to date, with increasing amounts of wind energy, has been successful. There have been no incidents in which the wind has directly or indirectly been a major factor causing operational problems for the system. However, there are a number of parameters that are being monitored that indicate the need for active management in the near future (and in some cases already today). In this article, we briefly describe the situations in these four countries, giving special emphasis to the market integration of wind power, the use of wind forecasting, and curtailment experience. The final section provides an overview of the main wind forecasting methodologies and challenges.

Toward a Benchmark test system for the offshore grid in the North Sea

In an effort to protect the environment despite the projected development of the electrical power system, the European community is focusing on a significant increase in the installed wind power capacity up to the level of 300 GW by the year 2030 throughout Europe. Most of the planned installations - about 150 GW - are going to be realized in the offshore sector, a large part of which will be located in the North Sea. Such development will lead to new challenges regarding integration of the bulk offshore wind power into the power systems and will require a comprehensive analysis concerning various aspects such as optimal planning and operation taking into account new concepts, as multi-terminal VSC HVDC. In this paper the establishment of a test system for analysis of the offshore DC grid behavior is proposed taking into account the recent structural and technological concepts on this field as well as the national plans. Hence, in the first step the configuration of the analyzed offshore grid was defined, which includes a mix of AC and DC system. Further, the assumptions for the system parameters will be discussed and the implementation of this test system into a power system simulator as well as some exemplary calculations will be shown.

Currents of change

The power systems in Denmark, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and Germany have some of the highest wind penetrations in the world, as shown in the paper. In this article, the situations of five countries with high wind penetration are briefly presented, with special emphasis given to their future needs with respect to accommodating targeted wind power amounts. The final section provides an overview of offshore grid developments and plans in Europe.

Integrating Variable Renewables in Europe : Current Status and Recent Extreme Events

In recent months, energy policy in the European Union (EU) has started to focus on the concrete actions required to ensure the realization of a functioning internal energy market in the context of high levels of renewable energy in the post-2020 period. The most important developments include the agreement by the European Council on energy and climate targets for 2030 and the launch of the Energy Union by the European Commission in February 2015. Against the political agreement already reached that the EU would reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 80% by 2050, European leaders have adopted a set of interim climate change and energy targets that include, for instance - a legally binding target for a reduction in EU GHG emissions of 40% by 2030 compared to 1990 - a legally binding target of at least 27% at the EU levelfor the share of renewable energy consumed in the EU in 2030 - an indicative (nonbinding) target of at least 27% at the EU level for improving energy efficiency in 2030 compared to projections of future energy consumption based on the current criteria.

MaWind - tool for the aggregation of wind farm models

The existing software for the simulation of power system operation was mainly developed and optimized for the analysis of conventional systems that are characterized by a low number of large, central synchronous generators. New forms of power generation, like wind turbines, that are characterized by a high number of small units can not be analyzed effectively with this software. In this paper a new software tool, MaWind, for the aggregation of wind farm models for dynamic system analysis is described. The MaWind tool uses a new mathematical approach to represent wind generation in system analysis. The background of this method, the method itself and some representative results of the calculation with MaWind are presented in the paper. MaWind allows for significant reduction of the model complexity while retaining a good approximation of dynamic farm behavior at the same time.

Integrating dispersed generation into the Danish power system - present situation and future prospects

Since the early 80s a huge amount of dispersed generation (DG) has been implemented into the Danish power systems. Today the Danish system has a share of 18.5% electricity consumption produced by wind turbines and 26.5% produced by combined heat and power units (CHP), of which the biggest part is installed in the western part of Denmark. The paper shows the technical measures as well as utilization of market mechanisms applied by the Danish system operator, Energinet.dk, to handle the challenging situation of safe and reliable system operation. Future prospects with respect to the internationally growing wind power capacity and respective need for a market for ancillary services are presented

Connecting the Dots: Regional Coordination for Offshore Wind and Grid Development

By 2020, it is expected that about 42 GW of offshore wind capacity will be built in European waters and 30 GW off the shore of China. According to the U.S. Department of Energys National Offshore Wind Strategy, estimates for the United States are for approximately 10 GW of offshore capacity by then. This article gives an overview of current developments in this area from a power system point of view, namely, the offshore grid deployment that needs to accompany the offshore wind generation development. General ideas are given concerning political plans and related studies about technology issues, regulatory and market arrangements, and experience with offshore grid demonstration projects.

Offshore Power System Operation Planning Considering Energy Market Schedules

This paper analyzes selected issues concerning operational strategies for multiterminal dc offshore power systems (OPSs). In the first section, the main challenges regarding the operation of such an OPS are discussed, and a proposal is given for a new observer-based management system (OBMS) used for operation coordination using references from the energy market. In the second section, different operational scenarios for the OPS are investigated in order to present the OBMS application. For this purpose, a test system that considers the expected European future wind power development is introduced. Then, using reference power flows from the hourly market, the influence of the OBMS optimization process on the power flows aiming at minimum deviations from the reference energy market signals will be presented. Some exemplary test simulations are performed and recommendations are given.

Reliability investigations for a DC offshore power system

This paper deals with reliability assessment issues for a DC Offshore Power System. In the first step a methodology for reliability evaluation of an offshore power system is characterized. For this purpose new reliability indices are introduced in order to take the specific character of the offshore grid into account. Then, using a Monte Carlo simulation approach, exemplary simulations are carried out for a selected test system. The performed simulations show a strong influence of redundancy level on the reliability indices.