Complementarity Assessment of South Greenland Katabatic Flows and West Europe Wind Regimes

Current global environmental challenges require vigorous and diverse actions in the energy sector. One solution that has recently attracted interest consists in harnessing high-quality variable renewable energy resources in remote locations, while using transmission links to transport the power to end users. In this context, a comparison of western European and Greenland wind regimes is proposed. By leveraging a regional atmospheric model specifically designed to accurately capture polar phenomena, local climatic features of southern Greenland are identified to be particularly conducive to extensive renewable electricity generation from wind. A methodology to assess how connecting remote locations to major demand centres would benefit the latter from a resource availability standpoint is introduced and applied to the aforementioned Europe-Greenland case study, showing superior and complementary wind generation potential in the considered region of Greenland with respect to selected European sites.Comment: Published in Elsevier Energ

e-Highway2050 : préparer le réseau européen à un mix énergétique décarboné

La lutte contre le changement climatique est un des piliers de la politique énergétique européenne, stimulant un développement massif des énergies renouvelables dans le système électrique. Le mouvement de transition énergétique ainsi engagé présente des enjeux de taille pour les gestionnaires de réseaux de transport d’électricité qui doivent anticiper une évolution des infrastructures et des processus opérationnels pour s’adapter à la localisation et aux caractéristiques de ces nouveaux moyens de production. Piloté par RTE et impliquant 38 partenaires, le projet européen e-Highway2050 a montré l’importance du réseau de transport européen pour répondre aux enjeux de la politique énergétique. Il a aussi constitué une étude « preuve de concept » pour valider des innovations méthodologiques nécessaires à l’identification des investissements clés

Quantification of capacity credit and reserve requirements from the large scale integration of wind energy in the french power system

International audienceThe paper presents results of a detailed study carried out to simulate the integration of large amount of wind power in the French power system. The targets set for France are between 10_000 and 14_000 MW of installed wind capacity by year 2010. In order to simulate the projected wind production, hourly wind speed measurements from 40 sites spread over the country and covering a period of 3 years are used. The data reflect both temporal and spatial correlations that are proper to the climate conditions in France. Then, realistic scenarios are built for the installation of several levels of wind power based on appropriate assumptions. The simulation of each scenario provides a detailed profile of the wind production at a national level. The paper presents the level of guaranteed wind power that is provided for given probability for each scenario. The variability of the production is analyzed in order to define the reserve or storage requirements to achieve a secure integration of wind power. Finally, an analysis is presented on how wind generation can be integrated in the national power generation mix in France

Critical Time Windows for Renewable Resource Complementarity Assessment

This paper proposes a framework to assess the complementarity between geographically dispersed variable renewable energy resources over arbitrary time scales. More precisely, the framework relies on the concept of critical time windows, which offers an accurate, time-domain description of low-probability power production events impacting power system operation and planning. A scalar criticality indicator is also derived to quantify the spatiotemporal complementarity that renewable generation sites may exhibit, and it is leveraged to propose optimisation models seeking to identify deployment patterns with maximum complementarity. The usefulness of the framework is shown in a case study investigating the complementarity between wind regimes in continental western Europe and southern Greenland, using roughly 300 candidate locations and 10 years of reanalysis and simulated data with hourly resolution. Besides showing that the occurrence of low wind power production events can be reduced on a regional scale by exploiting diversity in local wind patterns, results highlight the fact that aggregating wind power production sites located on different continents may result in a lower occurrence of system-wide low wind power production events and point to potential bene ts of intercontinental electrical interconnections