Impact of wind power production in a European Optimal Power Flow

Abstract

This paper presents a study of a large part of the European synchronous electrical network, spanning latitudinally from Denmark to Italy and longitudinally from France to Poland. The aim of the developed methodology is to select wind power production scenarios among a large range of scenarios considering their impact on the economical dispatch of power plants. For this study the transmission network, loads and production are aggregated at the Extra High Voltage (EHV) level. The calculations are carried out using Optimal Power Flow simulations and allow to obtain different kind of results: local results like power transits on lines or borders, congestion indicators for lines, and overall results like the cost of a given dispatch, in each zone, or re-dispatching indexes.The study is carried out on a near future winter peak hour (2018), the load being estimated at 310GW, and wind power installed capacity at 94GW for the part of Europe considered, whereas photovoltaic is neglected as the peak hour occurs at 7p.m.Wind power production is very important and, due to its variability, it seems clear that a single wind production scenario is not sufficient to characterize correctly the net demand. For this reason, we develop in this paper a technique that, starting from historical time series aggregated at the country level, leads to the selection of a shortlist of wind production scenarios statistically relevant. We show how to use Principal Component Analysis and clustering techniques to obtain the shortlist of scenarios to be simulated. Different techniques are compared, analysing the statistical impact on relevant results (transits, cost). The results follow a discrete distribution dependent on the wind scenarios selected, and thus allow to capture the correlations with wind production in different countries.