Resilience to storm conditions of power systems with large dependencies on offshore wind

Abstract

The ongoing transition towards large installations of offshore wind and the electrification of the transport sector and other critical infrastructures introduce new vulnerabilities to the society. Large dependencies of power production from offshore wind are expected in the next decades, but there are large knowledge gaps regarding the power production reliability under severe weather conditions. Simultaneously, weather extremes may increase in frequency and intensity, driven by climate change. In this paper we investigate the resilience of a power system subject to a hurricane event. The power system is based on the IEEE39-bus New England system but with different scenarios for increasing penetration of offshore wind. We find that an offshore wind penetration level of 30% or less results in a power system resilient to hurricane events, with no need for load disconnection. However, when increased to 40% offshore wind penetration, 650 MW corresponding to 10% of the total load demand gets disconnected during the storm peak. With a penetration of 50% offshore wind, the disconnected load ranges from 2.2 GW of load corresponding to 1/3 of the total load demand, to a total power system blackout.