Powering Europe - European Wind Energy Association

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A set of market rules for facilitating wind power’s efficient
market integration needs to take the characteristic
properties of wind energy into account, namely:
• Distributed and continental: Wind power is a continental
resource, related to large meteorological
phenomena (on the scale of 1,000 km) exploited at
geographically dispersed sites. Wind resource availability
has a low geographical correlation.
• Predictability: The quality of wind power forecasts increases
with a shorter forecast horizon and over a larger
area. Along with each forecast, confidence margins
can be supplied in order to schedule reserves to compensate
for potential forecast errors (see Vol. 2 and 3).
• Variability: The characteristic significant wind power
variations are in the range of 15 minutes to a few days.
Wind speed is correlated for short distances but not
chApTEr 5 electrIcItymarketDeSIgN
for long distances - over 1,000 kilometres (Chapter 2).
• Low marginal costs: Wind energy requires no fuel.
Therefore, its marginal cost is very low and electricity
is produced without green house gas emissions.
Consequently, wind power should be used whenever
wind is available. At times of low demand, wind power
will have to compete with power from bulk load
plants, which often cannot adapt their output to fast
changing set points.
Integrating wind power with the above characteristics
is easier in an electricity system that has the following
characteristics:
• System spanning a large geographical area enabling
the variability to be smoothened and predictability
and capacity value to be maximised.
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Photo: Detlev Gehring-SST