Spatial-Economic Potential Analysis of Wind Power Plants in Germany

David Hennecke,Carsten Croonenbroeck

doi:10.3390/wind1010005

Abstract

Before a new wind farm can be built, politics and regional planning must approve of the respective area as a suitable site. For this purpose, large-scale potential computations were carried out to identify suitable areas. The calculation of wind power plant potential usually focuses on capturing the highest energy potential. In Germany, due to an energy production reimbursement factor defined in the Renewable Energy Sources Act (“Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz”, EEG) in 2017, the influence of energy quantities on the power plant potential varies, economically and spatially. Therefore, in addition to the calculation of energy potentials, it was also necessary to perform a potential analysis in terms of economic efficiency. This allows, on the one hand, an economic review of the areas tendered by the regional planning and, on the other hand, a spatial-economic analysis that expands the parameters in the search for new areas. In this work, (a) potentials with regard to the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) were calculated by the example of the electricity market in Germany, which were then (b) spatially and statistically processed on the level of the federal states.

Highlights

Since the base dataset as well as the calculations of energy yields and weighted en84 ergy yields were separated, a comparison between both values could be drawn to illustrate the effects of the introduced correction factor
The The value ranges were divided intolose five tractive areas extended to the entirety of Germany
This paper shows how much the renewable energies (RE) potentials evaluation can change through the use of policy tools such as the correction factor

Summary

Introduction

Wind 2021, 1, With the aim of making energy production climate-friendly, the expansion of renewable energies is an essential component of worldwide energy policy. By using a fixed feed-in tariff for wind energy, which was regulated by a nominal degressive annual reduction for 20 years, an economic incentive for expansion was to be created. The focus of these analyses is on the potential energy yield, on the number of plants that can be installed, or on the calculated minimum capacity exploitation, i.e., the number of equivalent full load hours per year. Afterwards, attractive areas can be filtered out depending on the defined energy threshold and be used for potential calculation, such as the number of turbines ([7,8]). The general prohibition of construction on areas such as protected areas, airports, and settlement areas is overall valid, which means that these critical areas are often excluded from large-wind energy scale calculations ([7])

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