A 34-year simulation of wind generation potential for Ireland and the impact of large-scale atmospheric pressure patterns

Abstract

To study climate-related aspects of power system operation with large volumes of wind generation, data with sufficiently wide temporal and spatial scope are required. The relative youth of the wind industry means that long-term data from real systems are not available. Here, a detailed aggregated wind power generation model is developed for the Republic of Ireland using MERRA reanalysis wind speed data and verified against measured wind production data for the period 2001-2014. The model is most successful in representing aggregate power output in the middle years of this period, after the total installed capacity had reached around 500MW. Variability on scales of greater than 6 hours is captured well by the model; one additional higher resolution wind dataset was found to improve the representation of higher frequency variability. Finally, the model is used to hindcast hypothetical aggregate wind production over the 34-year period 1980-2013, based on existing installed wind capacity. A relationship is found between several of the production characteristics, including capacity factor, ramping and persistence, and two large-scale atmospheric patterns-the North Atlantic Oscillation and the East Atlantic Pattern.

Characterizing the winter meteorological drivers of the European electricity system using targeted circulation types

“…Research in the energy-meteorology community has focused on identifying power system responses to these existing weather-based classification schemes. The NAO is the best studied pattern for Europe with demonstrated connections to electricity demand (Ely et al, 2013;Thornton et al, 2017;Bloomfield et al, 2018), wind power (Brayshaw et al, 2011;Zubiate et al, 2016;Cradden et al, 2017;Bloomfield et al, 2018) and solar power (Colantuono et al, 2014) across various European countries. Physically this is consistent with the NAO's association with the shifting path of extra-tropical cyclones travelling across the North Atlantic (Hurrell et al, 2003): NAO+ (the positive phase of the NAO) generally results in warm, wet and windy conditions over Northern Europe and leads to reduced demand and increased wind power generation (Ely et al, 2013;Cradden et al, 2017;Bloomfield et al, 2018;Ravestein et al, 2018), while Southern Europe experiences belowaverage wind speeds and, therefore, wind power generation (Jerez et al, 2013;Zubiate et al, 2016).…”

A weather regime characterisation of Irish wind generation and electricity demand in winters 2009–11

“…The zonal regime, with its strong similarity to NAO positive conditions, is clearly related to lower weather-related demand, i.e. higher air temperatures, in agreement with Comas-Bru and McDermott (2014), and higher wind capacity factors, as found in Cradden et al (2017). Importantly, there is a high degree of intra-regime variance in WRD and wind capacity factor, similar to results found for GB (Thornton et al 2017), and so the predictive capability of these regimes with respect to the regular planning and operation of electricity systems at a seasonal level may require further consideration.…”

“…The dataset has been verified against records and represents an improvement on similar but less sophisticated datasets, e.g. Cradden et al (2017), Cannon et al (2015).…”

Simulation of transcontinental wind and solar PV generation time series

“…In addition, meteorological reanalysis techniques have proven to be a powerful tool to generate plausible past states of the atmosphere across large geographical areas over time. This meteorological information can be then used to perform country-wise simulations of wind power generation [4,5], solar generation [6] as well as both wind and solar power across Europe [7]. This work aims at presenting a detailed methodology to generate hourly time series of aggregated wind and solar at the country level.…”