Modelling the Geographic Distribution of Wind Power and the Impact on Transmission Needs

Denmark is the country in the world with the highest penetration of wind power with a share of 12.6% of total electricity supply in 2000. This production is beyond the control of the central load dispatch. Denmark also has substantial industrial CHP and CHP-based district heating at 78.8% of total electricity supply. Of this, 24.6 percentage points is beyond the central load dispatch's control (Danish Energy Agency 2001a). CHP and wind power is expected to increase, and in spite of environmental benefits this is a cause for concern. The immediate issue of concern is load balancing but equally important is the secondary issue of transmission capacity both domestically and internationally as wind turbines often are erected in locations with relatively weak grids and with import/export being relied upon to assist load balancing. Scattered load balancing is a means to alleviate both of these problems. Through energy systems modelling, transmission systems modelling and geographical modelling, this article examines the sensitivity of the response of the transmission system to the geographic distributions of wind power and in particular the sensitivity of the results to the accuracy of the distribution modelled. The results show that accuracy of the geographic modelling while important for the analysis of specific single transmission lines is not important for the analysis of the general response of the transmission system. The analyses thus corroborate previous analyses that demonstrated that scattered load balancing reduce transmission capacity requirements.

Keywords:

Wind power , CHP , distributed generation , transmission , dispatch , load balancing