Impact of wind power on sizing and allocation of reserve requirements

The increasing share of renewable energy sources for electricity, driven by variable output technologies such as wind and solar photovoltaics, is expected to have an impact on the operational reserve requirements of power systems. This study applies a probabilistic approach to estimate reserve requirements and establishes a methodology that makes it possible to distinguish between different categories of reserves based on the imbalance drivers of wind power. The methodology is based on sizing fast-response reserves based on the distribution of output fluctuations inside the settlement period, and sizing slow-response reserves based on the distribution of the average prediction error over the settlement period. The main advantage of this methodology is a reduction of the fast-response reserves, which are generally assessed as expensive compared to slow-response reserves. This approach is applied in a case study and compared with alternative strategies. The results for 500 MW of wind power installed in a North Sea country confirm these reductions and show that with the suggested approach the required fast-response and slow-response reserves, respectively, amount to 7 and 23–26% of the installed wind power capacity.