Reduced storage and balancing needs in a fully renewable European power system with excess wind and solar power generation

Abstract

The storage and balancing needs of a simplified European power system, which is based on wind and solar power generation only, are derived from an extensive weather-driven modeling of hourly power mismatches between generation and load. The storage energy capacity, the annual balancing energy and the balancing power are found to depend significantly on the mixing ratio between wind and solar power generation. They decrease strongly with the overall excess generation. At 50 % excess generation the required long-term storage energy capacity and annual balancing energy amount to 1 % of the annual consumption. The required balancing power turns out to be 25 % of the average hourly load. These numbers are in agreement with current hydro storage lakes in Scandinavia and the Alps, as well as with potential hydrogen storage in mostly North-German salt caverns.

Optimal management of wind and solar energy resources

“…As seen from the graph, there exist assets, such as the encircled wind farm installations at the bottom of Fig. 6, which if examined individually would be probably disre garded as being highly inefficient 11 . However, these installations are to some extent essential for the overall plan, as they supple ment other sites in days of low productivity and thus contribute to a overall reduction in the aggregate risk levels.…”

“…This way one creates a composite risk diversification strategy which takes into account not only the smoothing effect of geographical aggregation but also the fact that wind and solar energy typically have complementary profiles 2 . Despite the rela tively few research papers on the complementarity of wind and solar resources [10,11,20,29,34], little has yet been said as to how this meteorological pattern can been utilized in the decision making process in particular, when it comes to reducing the risk of renewable energy supply. This paper attempts to fill in this literature gap, by presenting a portfolio based strategy for the optimal exploitation of wind and solar resources.…”

Energy system modelling – interactions and synergies in a highly renewable Pan-European power system

“…Another option would be the installation of storage capacities, where energy is stored at times of excess generation from RES and it is fed into the system again in times of deficit. In a hypothetical system based completely on solar and wind resources, the required storage capacities for Europe is estimated to be in the order of 400 TWh though [8,12]. Besides the costs of large storage capacities, the question arises if we would even be able to build up the required storage capacities in Europe as chemical storage devices are currently the only technology suitable for such high amounts of energy [10,13].…”

The role of aggregation in power system simulation

“…INTRODUCTION to model the power system with a very coarse representation by aggregating all generation sources. Some publications investigated if demand is matched on an hourly basis by combining different RES with complementary intermittency [14] as well as with excess in RES production [15].…”