Powering Europe - European Wind Energy Association

Waysofenhancingwindpowerintegration
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of generating capacity in the system, the capitalised
value of the reduced fuel cost due to storage is as
high as €1,164/kW for systems with low flexibility,
and €302/kW for systems with high flexibility 4 .
These are typical numbers that should be used in
assessing the economic feasibility: in other words,
can a storage plant be built for that cost?
• interconnection: the interconnection capacity that is
available for power exchange between countries is
a significant source of flexibility in a power system.
The capacity should be both technically and commercially
available. Aspects related to the implementation
and costs of improving interconnection
are discussed in detail in Chapter 2.
• fast markets: There is a lot of diversity in European
power market rules. Day-ahead markets exist in
nearly every country. The day-ahead forecast error
for wind energy has gone down a lot in recent years
thanks to improved weather forecast models, but
the error is still higher than the intra-day forecast
4 conversion: 1 GBp = 1.2 EUr
error. In the interest of minimising cost to consumers,
the gate closure times should be reduced in
order to bring down the uncertainty in forecasting
and in this way reduce the last minute adjustments
in balancing. Organising markets all over Europe to
operate faster, on shorter gate closure times (typically
three hours ahead) would dramatically improve
the economics of integrating large amounts of wind
power in the European power systems.
In several countries, studies have been carried out or
are underway to investigate the consequences of the
integration of large amounts of wind power in terms
of additional reserve requirements, needs for flexible
generation, operational practices in the power system,
required reinforcements of the network and other integration
solutions such as a more responsive demand
and storage in the power system. Examples of such
studies, in Germany, the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands,
Denmark and other countries in the Nordic area are
described on page 83 of this chapter.
Powering Europe: wind energy and the electricity grid