Abstract
In the coming years the geographical distribution of wind farms in Great Britain is expected to change significantly. Following the development of the “round 3” wind zones (circa 2025), most of the installed capacity will be located in large offshore wind farms. However, the impact of this change in wind-farm distribution on the characteristics of national wind generation is largely unknown. This study uses a 34-year reanalysis dataset (Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) from National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (NASA-GMAO)) to produce a synthetic hourly time series of GB-aggregated wind generation based on: (1) the “current” wind farm distribution; and (2) a “future” wind farm distribution scenario. The derived data are used to estimate a climatology of extreme wind power events in Great Britain for each wind farm distribution. The impact of the changing wind farm distribution on the wind-power statistics is significant. The annual mean capacity factor increased from 32.7% for the current wind farm distribution to 39.7% for the future distribution. In addition, there are fewer periods of prolonged low generation and more periods of prolonged high generation. Finally, the frequency and magnitude of ramping in the nationally aggregated capacity factor remains largely unchanged. However, due to the increased capacity of the future distribution, in terms of power output, the magnitude of the ramping increases by a factor of 5.
Highlights
Under the EU 2008 Renewables Directive, the UK is expected to produce 15% of its total energy consumption from renewable sources by 2020 [1]
The hourly Great Britain (GB)-aggregated capacity factor time series described in Section 2.1 has been used to analyse the annual mean capacity factor that would have been produced between 1980 and 2013, if the wind farm distributions described in Section 2.2 had been present
If only the offshore wind farms were added, the frequency distribution of the GB-aggregated capacity factor is shifted to the higher values and is very similar to the results for the future wind farm distribution, in this case the mean capacity factor increases to 40.6%
Summary
Under the EU 2008 Renewables Directive, the UK is expected to produce 15% of its total energy consumption from renewable sources by 2020 [1]. It is not possible to assess the frequency of these events directly from generation records as they do not extend back far enough to accurately determine the representative return periods [6] This is due to inter-annual variability in the wind speed as well as the changing geographical distribution of the wind capacity [7]. To successfully prepare for the impact of increased future wind penetration on the electricity transmission system in Great Britain (GB), it is necessary to understand the impact of this change in wind-farm distribution on the operational characteristics of national wind generation. The concentration of large amounts of wind capacity close together in offshore zones could increase the variability in the total wind power resource and reverse the smoothing previously gained through the geographical dispersion of wind farms.
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