Publication Date:
2019-03-19
Description:
Wind energy has seen large deployment and substantial cost reductions over the last decades. Further ambitious upscaling is urgently needed to keep the goals of the Paris Agreement within reach. While the variability of wind power generation poses a challenge to grid integration, much progress in quantifying, understanding and managing it has been made over the last years. Despite this progress, relevant modes of variability in energy generation have been overlooked. Based on long-term reanalyses of the 20th century, we demonstrate that multi-decadal wind variability has significant impact on wind energy generation in Germany. These modes of variability can not be detected in modern reanalyses that are typically used for energy applications due to their short covered timespan of around 40 years. We show that energy generation over a 20 y wind park lifetime varies by around ± 5 % and the summer-to-winter ratio varies by around ± 15 %. Moreover, ERA-interim based annual and winter generations are biased high as the period 1979–2010 overlaps with a maximum of multi-decadal variability. The induced variations of windpark lifetime revenues are at the order of 10 % with direct implications for profitability. Our results require to rethink energy system design, for example the calculation of optimum shares of different renewable technologies, as a perpetual process.
Electronic ISSN:
2366-7621
Topics:
Energy, Environment Protection, Nuclear Power Engineering
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