Investigating Wind Energy Curtailment to Enable Constraint Analysis and Green Hydrogen Potential in Scotland’s Energy Infrastructure

Thomas Storey, Wolf-Gerrit Früh and Sudhagar Pitchaimuthu ()
Additional contact information
Thomas Storey: Research Centre for Carbon Solutions (RCCS), Institute of Mechanical, Processing and Energy Engineering, School of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS, UK
Wolf-Gerrit Früh: Institute of Mechanical, Processing and Energy Engineering, School of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS, UK
Sudhagar Pitchaimuthu: Research Centre for Carbon Solutions (RCCS), Institute of Mechanical, Processing and Energy Engineering, School of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS, UK

Energies, 2025, vol. 18, issue 11, 1-21

Abstract: Curtailment of renewable energy is a growing issue in global energy infrastructure. A case study is carried out to investigate wind energy curtailment occurring in Scotland, which presents a growing issue, with an increasing amount of renewable energy going to waste. Complex relationships between grid constraints and wind farm operations must be explored to maximise utilisation of low-carbon electricity and to avoid the “turn-up” of non-renewable sources. Transmission zones and boundaries are considered and mapped, and a novel method of direct measurement of curtailment for transmission-level assets is proposed, with an intuitive, reproducible approach utilising balancing mechanism data. Curtailment data is examined and combined to find national trends, explore the viability of distributed hydrogen electrolysis, and compare curtailment and constraint directly across transmission boundaries. The weaknesses of the data collection methods are considered, solutions for a future iteration are proposed, and further uses of the outputs are discovered.

Keywords: wind energy; curtailment; constraint; transmission; hydrogen electrolysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/18/11/2777/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/18/11/2777/ (text/html)

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:gam:jeners:v:18:y:2025:i:11:p:2777-:d:1665337

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().