Wind Power in areas with limited export capability

Titel: Wind Power in areas with limited export capability
Författare:
Julija Matevosyan
Utgivare:
Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan
Årtal:
2004
Ämnesord:
Infrastruktur, Elnät
Sökord/keywords: HVAC, HVDC, Voltage stability, Vindforsk.
Avhandling (Pdf)



Sammanfattning/Abstract:
During the last two decades, increase in electricity demand and environmental concern resulted in fast growth of power production from renewable sources. Wind power is one of the most e±cient alternatives. Due to rapid development of wind turbine technology and increasing size of wind farms, wind power plays a significant part in the power production mix of Germany, Spain, Denmark and some other countries.

Wind power has to be build in areas with good wind potential. The best conditions for installation of wind power are, thus, in remote areas free of obstacles, and consequently with low population density. The transmission system in such areas might not be  dimensioned to accommodate additional large-scale power plants. Insufficient transmission capacity problem, however, would emerge for any type of new generation,
planned in similar conditions, although wind power has some special features that should be considered solving this problem.

In this thesis the four possibilities are considered. One possibility is to revise the methods for calculation of available transmission capacity. Another solution for large-scale integration of wind power in such areas is to reinforce the network. This alternative however may be expensive and time consuming. Since wind power production depends on the wind speed, the wind farm utilization time is only 2000-4000 hours a year, and power
production peaks not necessarily occur during periods with insufficient transmission capacity. Therefore wind energy curtailment may be considered as an alternative for large-scale wind power integration. It is also possible to store excess wind energy during the periods with insu±cient transmission capacity. Conventional power plants with possibilities of fast production control (e.g. hydropower plants or gas power plants) may also be employed for this purpose.

There is a lot of research regarding first two measures, therefore, this thesis provides a review and summarized conclusions from the existing work and further concentrates on development of the methods for estimation of wind energy curtailment and evaluation of wind energy storage possibility in hydro reservoirs.

Methods similar to probabilistic production cost simulation are developed for estimation of wind energy curtailment. The developed methods are applicable to discrete variables (measurements) and also generalized for continuous variables with known distribution.

For evaluation of wind energy storage possibility the optimization problem is formulated, the objective of this evaluation is to minimize the costs for power production under consideration of the future water value. The developed method allows us to analyze previous years of operation of the power system (e.g. dry, wet and normal year) and evaluate physical possibilities for wind energy storage. The developed methods are than tested for Swedish power system and the results are also summarized in this thesis.