Integration of wind and solar power in Europe: Assessment of flexibility requirements

Matthias Huber, Desislava Dimkova and Thomas Hamacher

Energy, 2014, vol. 69, issue C, 236-246

Abstract: Flexibility is the ability of a power system to respond to changes in power demand and generation. Integrating large shares of variable renewable energy sources, in particular wind and solar, can lead to a strong increase of flexibility requirements for the complementary system, traditionally hydrothermal, which has to balance the fluctuations of variable generation. We quantify these flexibility requirements at the operational timescale of 1–12 hours and different spatial scales across Europe. Our results indicate that three major factors determine the ramping flexibility needed in future power systems: the penetration of variable renewables, their mix and the geographic system size. Compared to the variability of load, flexibility requirements increase strongly in systems with combined wind and PV (photovoltaics) contribution of more than 30% of total energy and a share of PV in the renewables mix above 20–30%. In terms of extreme ramps, the flexibility requirements of a geographically large, transnational power system are significantly lower than of smaller regional systems, especially at high wind penetration.

Keywords: Power system flexibility; Variable renewable generation; Wind power; Solar power; Power system design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (208)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544214002680
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:69:y:2014:i:c:p:236-246

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2014.02.109

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().