Powering Europe - European Wind Energy Association

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5.1 Cost estimates
The “transmission cost” is the additional costs of integrating
wind power into the transmission system. Several
national and international studies are looking into these
costs, quantifying the grid extension measures and the
associated costs caused by additional generation and
demand in general, and by wind power production in particular.
The report [Holttinen, 2009] gives an overview of
the results of the relevant study. The analyses are based
on load flow simulations for the corresponding national
transmission and distribution grids and take the different
wind energy integration scenarios into account using the
existing, planned and future sites.
The cost of grid reinforcements needed for wind power
integration is very dependent on where the wind power
plants are located relative to load and grid infrastructure.
It is not surprising that these costs vary a good deal from
112
country to country and cannot be directly compared because
of the different local circumstances. The studies
found that the cost normalised over wind power capacity
ranges from €0-270/kW. Normalised over wind energy
production, the costs are in the range of €0.1-5/MWh.
For wind energy penetration of up to 30% they are typically
approximately 10% of wind energy generation costs
(around the same level as the additional balancing costs
needed for reserves in the system in order to accommodate
wind power). Just like the additional balancing
costs, the network costs increase with the wind penetration
level, but unlike the additional balancing costs, the
cost increase is not parallel to the increasing wind penetration.
There can be one-off, very high cost reinforcements
due to a variety of factors, for example related to
social acceptance issues which may cause underground
cabling for parts of the transmission line with much higher
costs than foreseen.
Powering Europe: wind energy and the electricity grid
Photo: Javier Arcenillas