Energy Storage Requirements to match Wind Generation and Demand applied to the UK network

Abstract

Increasing the contribution from Renewable Energy Systems to the electricity network places increasing demands on both, power quality assurance as well as energy storage or back-up generation availability. Based on a set of forty typical UK years, generated by matching 10 years of hourly wind speed observations at a typical site in Scotland to four years of hourly UK demand data from the National Grid, the statistics of the hour-by hour matching of wind generation to the demand and the cumulative effects of electricity surplus or deficit is analysed to obtain measures for the energy requirements and their associated time scales to complement the wind power through energy storage technologies or complementary scheduled generation. The findings for the UK case suggest that the overwhelming majority of energy balancing occurs over a time scale of less than a week, where the energy storage capacity is around 10 MWh per MW of installed wind capacity.