Wind Power Integration in Power Systems with Transmission Bottlenecks

Sammanfattning: During the last two decades, the increase in electricity demand and environmental concern resulted in fast growth of power production from renewable sources. Wind power is one of the most efficient alternatives. Due to the rapid development of wind turbine technology and increasing size of wind farms, wind power plays a significant part in the power production mix of Germany, Spain, Denmark, and some other countries.The best conditions for the development of wind farms are in remote, open areas with low population density. The transmission system in such areas might not be dimensioned to accommodate additional large-scale power infeed. Furthermore a part of the existing transmission capacity might already be reserved for conventional power plants situated in the same area.In this thesis four alternatives for large-scale wind power integration in areas with transmission bottlenecks are considered. The first possibility is to revise the methods for calculation of available transmission capacity. The second solution for large-scale integration of wind power in such areas is to reinforce the network. This alternative, however, may be expensive and time consuming. As wind power production depends on the wind speed, the full load hours of wind turbine generator are only 2000-4000 hours per year. Therefore reinforcing a transmission network in order to remove a bottleneck completely is often not economically justified. Wind energy curtailments during congestion situations is then the third solution for large-scale wind power integration with less or no grid reinforcement. The fourth solution is to store excess wind energy. Pumped hydro storage or battery storage for the large-scale wind farms are still rather expensive options, but existing conventional power plants with fast production control capabilities and sufficient storage capacity, e.g., hydro power plants, could be used for this purpose.As there is a lot of research work on the first two alternatives, the thesis provides a review and summarizes the main conclusions from the existing work. The thesis is then directed towards the development of the methods for estimation of wind energy curtailments, evaluation of wind energy storage possibility in hydro reservoirs and development of short term hydro power production planning methods, considering coordination with wind power.Additionally in the thesis the strategy that minimizes imbalance costs of a wind power utility, trading wind power on the short term power market is elaborated and analyzed.