Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center

2008-09 Seminars

Stochastic Modeling for Wind Integration

Prof. Dr. Christoph Weber
Chair, Department of Energy
Professor, Institute for Energy Economics
University of Duisburg-Essen

Abstract
The rise of wind and solar energy as ecological, emission free energy sources has always been accompanied by the question, whether the inherent fluctuations in their production don't make them very poor substitutes of conventional, controllable electricity production from coal, gas and other power plants. Put in other terms, the question is whether their installation, being costly by itself, does not induce further costs necessary for the fluctuating renewables to be able to contribute to the overall power supply system. These costs are often summarized under the general term of "integration costs".

The presentation aims at providing in a first step a systematic approach to the categorization of various types of integration costs. In a second step, the focus is to use concepts of stochastic optimization to quantify the costs of variability and of (partial) impredictability associated with wind energy. Rolling planning is used to simulate the arrival of new information and a detailed model of the power system allows accounting for increases in start-up costs, reduced part load efficiency and network congestions.

Finally, the approaches developed are applied in a case study for European power systems.