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EWEA Press Release

Tuesday 27th September 2005

No technical barriers for large-scale integration of wind power in the european electricity grids, says IEA study

Brussels, 27th September 2005 – The European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) welcomed the conclusions of a working paper on renewable energies (1) published by the International Energy Agency (IEA), which investigates whether there are technical limits to the market penetration of renewable energy technologies, and wind more specifically. According to the IEA study, "the extent to which the intermittency of natural resources will become a barrier to renewables is mainly a question of economics and market organisation".

The IEA study draws together the existing literature from a number of countries and presents the current thinking on the technical and policy implications of variable electricity supply.

"The IEA report concludes that the natural variability of wind does not present a barrier for significant market penetration in electricity markets", said EWEA Chief Executive Corin Millais. "In fact wind is disadvantaged by faulty market conditions. There are known solutions - better grid integration, better market rules, improved weather forecasting techniques and geographical diversity. Wind is variable, and so is the entire electricity system - predictability is one key to variability"

The integration of larger amount of renewables will become an increasingly important issue for the management of electricity grids. The World Energy Outlook 2004 expects all renewables to account for 19% in world electricity generation by 2030 in the reference scenario, and up to 24% in the alternative policy scenario (IEA 2004 b). Currently, wind power provides 2.6% of European electricity needs, and is forecast to rise to 5.5% in 2010 and 12.1% in 2020 (2). National variations are wide around this average.

Notes to editors

(1) Variability of wind power and other renewable. Management options and strategies. International Energy Agency, August 2005. www.iea.org

(2) Wind power targets for Europe: 75,000MW by 2010. EWEA, October 2003. www.ewea.org

Extracts from the IEA report:

"Good weather and thus wind output predictions allow wind to reduce exposure to short term (expensive) balancing market to a minimum."

In summary, the size of swings in output from wind farms and the volatility of average output is significantly reduced through geographical output

Not only geographic diversity of wind turbines can minimise the impact of intermittency but also a diversity of different technologies.

Generally it can be concluded that the interconnection into a common grid of intermittent renewables can significantly reduce the size and volatility of aggregate output swings that can occur due to weather conditions .It also makes use of the fact that both supply and demand exhibit a constant fluctuation and that it is not important to ensure a steady supply of every single generator.

The short-term volatility and unpredictability of wind can be minimised to an extent where it disappears in the general fluctuation of the system. Generally, the strategies to address the intermittency of wind vary between different national or regional grids. Important factors are the degree of interconnection, the natural resource and the availability of flexible generation capacity. Transparent, inter-connected and well-functioning markets help to minimize these grid integration costs. Currently some markets are still designed with long gate-closure times which impose additional economic costs which are not necessarily based on technical needs. Taking this into account produces the right incentives for the development of portfolio of options to manage intermittency, including flexible new plants, storage technologies, distributed generation and demand-side response techniques. [–] the additional system costs for renewables that have been calculated for a 20% wind and biomass scenario in the UK would be Euros 4.9/MWh of renewable generation, but only Euros 0.44 MWh of total generation"

What renewables are charged for in balancing markets is not always reflective of the actual economic costs that intermittency might impose.

The review comes to the conclusion that a number of measures are necessary to integrate wind energy and other renewables into modern electricity grids, even though the fundamental technical principles are not new.

Ultimately, the question whether there is an upper limit for renewable penetration in to the existing grid will be an economic and regulatory one rather than a technical issue.

it was concluded , that the experience with wind power showed that integration was more an economic and political issue than a technical issues.

higher contributions from renewable energy seem feasible. The technical barriers to such a strategy are well understood and current estimates of associated costs of system integration indicate that the economically exploitable potential remains significant

From a policy point of view, it has to be analysed which are the least-cost options systems – wide in each case and furthermore, whether market participants are facing the right incentive structure to exploit these opportunities.

Click here to read the full report