Powering Europe - European Wind Energy Association

arrierstointegratingwindpowerintothepowermarket
• Sufficient internal network capacity 1 providing access
to distributed generation and balancing resources,
also enabling the aggregation of dispersed wind power.
• Operating close to real time to improve wind power
forecast accuracy and minimise uncertainty and the
additional balancing costs.
• Availability of a multitude of balancing resources (facilitated
by ‘the first point’ above).
• Availability of responsive demand and storage, e.g.
in the form of hydro power.
European markets are in the process of being liberalised
while enhancing sustainability, competitiveness
and security of supply. Wind power integration would
be best supported by a power market characterised by
the following aspects:
• Flexibility of the rescheduling of dispatch decisions
(time dimension) supported by functioning dayahead,
intraday and balancing markets.
• Flexibility of cross-border exchange supported by
sufficient cross border capacities, efficient trading
rules and functioning day-ahead, intraday and balancing
markets.
A high flexibility of rescheduling of dispatch decisions
will be required when demand and generation are subject
to frequent and significant unexpected changes
during the day. Flexibility is provided by generation
units with short activation times, e.g. combined cycle
gas turbine units or reservoir hydro units.
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Flexibility of cross-border exchange is beneficial for
market harmonisation. With an increasing share of
variable generation, flexible cross-border exchange
mechanisms contribute to optimising the dispatch of
electricity at international rather than national level.
The efficiency of cross-border exchange also depends
strongly on the mechanism for capacity allocation. Ideally,
capacity should be allocated in an implicit way
via market coupling mechanisms rather than by an explicit
auction.
Traditionally, market rules in Europe were developed
for nationally contained power systems with largely
thermal and centrally dispatched generation units.
The difficulties wind energy faces in gaining market
access are to a large extent due to the fact that existing
markets do not have the characteristics mentioned
in the five bullet points at the beginning of this page.
Significant barriers include the level of market access
for small and distributed wind power generators, and
the lack of information about spot market prices in alternative
neighbouring markets during the allocation
of cross-border capacity. Barriers faced by small generators
may be overcome by aggregation, and the lack
of information from alternative markets may be overcome
by the coupling of national markets with implicit
capacity allocation. Examples for market coupling are
the NordPool market in the Nordic countries and the
‘Pentalateral’ market coupling between the Benelux,
France and Germany.
1 In a large system like Europe, the internal network includes the cross-border links between Member States.
Powering Europe: wind energy and the electricity grid