In the next few years, there are plans to connect a variety of ambitious offshore wind projects to the European grids. In addition to new grid connection lines and grid reinforcement measures it is expected that additional measures for overall system operation will be required because of the intermittent nature of wind generation. In the short term, on timescales from less than a second to several hours, a variety of balancing services are necessary in order to maintain stable system operation. In the long term, wind generation can provide only limited contributions to guaranteed system capacities (e.g. in the event of peak demand). In this article, these aspects are addressed comprehensively when analysing the economics of large-scale intermittent wind generation. An approach is presented to estimate the additional system-related cost elements for different wind penetrations in a system.

By Hans Auer, Vienna University of Technology, Austria