Abstract
The future power system will have much more variable renewable power in its energy mix, adding to the challenge of maintaining a stable grid with balance between electricity consumption and electricity production. Curtailment of renewable power generation is one element of this.
In this study, the question of how much curtailment can be expected in a future scenario is addressed. This gives useful information for assessments of the need for and potential benefits of more advanced wind power controls.
The approach is based on power market simulations considering the transmission grid and a future 2040 scenario for the European power system. For this, an open dataset for the open-source PowerGAMA simulation tool has been developed and analysed. Key results are:
* The overall level of curtailment for onshore and offshore wind, as well as solar power, are high, with large variations from country to country. Average values range from about 2 % to
35 %.
* As expected, the curtailment is generally high when power availability is high.
* It is not possible to export excess power, since neighbouring countries typically have excess power at the same time.
There are additional outcomes of this work apart from the simulations results presented in this
report:
* A re-usable, open dataset that can be studied with the open PowerGAMA tool. This means that these results can be recreated, in principle, by anyone. And perhaps more importantly,
the study can be repeated with little effort to see what happens if assumptions are modified.
* Scripts that generate the dataset from its various original sources, available together with the dataset. These serve to give a detailed documentation of the procedure in generating
the above dataset and can be used to create modified datasets for follow-on studies.
* A comprehensive set of results from the simulations, that are stored in database format and may be reloaded for further analysis of curtailment or other power system
characteristics.