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The Role of Ensemble Forecasting in Integrating Renewables into Power Systems: From Theory to Real-Time Applications

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Integration of Large-Scale Renewable Energy into Bulk Power Systems

Part of the book series: Power Electronics and Power Systems ((PEPS))

Abstract

The growth of renewable energy sources (RES) in Europe continues on the basis of consumer paid financial incentives. The structure and size of these incentives reflect the resource and the national targets. For the competitiveness of RES, the aim is to keep the incentives as low as possible without stalling the development, which is likely to happen if the risk for the investments grows. This could be triggered by an increase in the integration cost of RES into the power system, because of too much concurrent generation and also lack of regulating capacity. A direct marketing approach combined with ensemble forecasts is the key element to integrate RES successful into the power systems via increased reliability, early detection of risk, detailed forecasting and integrated day-ahead and intra-day balancing strategy.We start this chapter with a review of existing ensemble forecasting techniques to form a profound understanding of the possibilities that lie in using ensemble forecasting in the power industry. This is followed by a demonstration of the risk in the power system caused by RES at times of extreme events with a number of different ensemble simulations. A review of the evolution of wind energy and PV is used to explain how much effort it took to trigger the evolution and illustrate in this way also what it would take to grow another energy source such as ocean wave energy to the same level. We describe the transition to direct marketing and how this increases the available regulating capacity. Our conclusion is that competitive trading and balancing of RES will need to take advantage of ensemble techniques, because decision making will be driven by an economic analysis including various risk factors. We have reason to expect that the risk analysis combined with moderate expectations to economic growth will make the market offer more competitive prices. The evolution seems straightforward, because each of the technologies are mature, but there is still a major gain from exploiting the synergies.

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Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank their valued customers, collaborators and partners for the inspiration to many of the topics presented in this chapter as well as the information provided to develop appropriate algorithms that can withstand in operational environments and in that way add value to the operation of the grid with growing amounts of renewable energies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. WEPROG GmbH, Böblingen, Germany

    Corinna Möhrlen

  2. WEPROG ApS, Assens, Denmark

    Jess U. Jørgensen

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  1. Corinna Möhrlen
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Correspondence to Corinna Möhrlen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Renewable Integration, Electric Reliability Council of Texas, Taylor, Texas, USA

    Pengwei Du

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA

    Ross Baldick

  3. Electric Power Research Institute, Chicago, Illinois, USA

    Aidan Tuohy

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Möhrlen, C., Jørgensen, J.U. (2017). The Role of Ensemble Forecasting in Integrating Renewables into Power Systems: From Theory to Real-Time Applications. In: Du, P., Baldick, R., Tuohy, A. (eds) Integration of Large-Scale Renewable Energy into Bulk Power Systems. Power Electronics and Power Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55581-2_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55581-2_3

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