There has been a massive boom in wind power capacity both in Europe
and worldwide. In 2015 global installed capacity was around 350 gigawatt
(GW), with 135 GW installed in Europe, distributed across some 87,000
wind turbines. Wind power now provides a bigger share (13 percent) of
electricity than nuclear power stations. In countries such as Spain,
Denmark and Germany, the amount of wind power already installed is in
theory enough to cover nationwide demand for electricity under ideal
conditions, i.e. maximum wind power output and low consumer demand.
Inconsistent output
However,
the amount of installed capacity says very little about how much
electricity is actually fed into the national grid by a country's wind
fleet. Unlike nuclear power, wind is by nature harder to predict. This
makes it difficult to connect wind farms to existing power grids.
Both
energy researchers and providers therefore need to simulate electricity
production across very short time intervals to accurately predict how
high the load could be at any given point in time.
Recently,
researchers have started performing such simulations with the help of
"reanalysis" models: global meteorological models fed with measured data
such as from weather stations and satellites, which process these
measurements into a coherent world-wide simulation of atmospheric
conditions.
0 comments:
Post a Comment