Effects of Wind Power Technology Development on Large-scale VRE Generation Variability

As variable renewable energy (VRE) shares are growing around the world, power systems are becoming more weather dependent. The weather driven variability in VRE generation can cause challenges to the operation and planning of power systems. This paper investigates how the expected technology development of wind power affects VRE generation variability over a large geographical area. A case study of Northern Europe is presented, where a mixture of offshore wind, onshore wind and solar photovoltaic generation is considered. Different scenarios with a doubling of today’s annual VRE energy generation is modelled. The results show that modern wind turbine technology can significantly decrease the variability in aggregate VRE generation. When considering also an optimal mixture of different VRE sources, standard deviation of the aggregate VRE generation is estimated to be 31 % lower compared to simply doubling existing installations.