Storage and demand-side options for integrating wind power

With the increased levels of wind power being seen worldwide and the projected further increases over the coming decades, there has been significant attention paid to emerging flexible resources such as storage and demand‐side options as a means to meet many of the challenges associated with wind integration. In particular, these resources could meet the increased flexibility requirements of systems with high wind due to variability and uncertainty of wind across timescales from seconds to minutes to hours or even days. Storage and demand‐side options are both characterized by the ability to respond quickly and accurately, to increase load as well as to provide generation resources and by the fact that they are energy limited in nature. Demand response can contribute to wind integration in different ways, using either price‐ or incentive‐based programs; the extent to which they can be used to integrate wind depends on the nature of the program. Electricity storage comes in many forms, with pumped hydro storage presently accounting for almost all grid storage, along with recent advances in battery and compressed air energy storage. The ability of storage to contribute to integrating wind power is limited mainly by the cost of deployment and the efficiency losses. While these features may not be as significant for demand response, there are significant regulatory and policy barriers in the way of deploying demand‐side options. Both storage and demand‐side resources provide support for wind integration in particular regarding provision of ancillary services and reduction of wind curtailment. WIREs Energy Environ 2014, 3:93–109. doi: 10.1002/wene.92 This article is categorized under: Wind Power > Economics and Policy Wind Power > Systems and Infrastructure Energy Systems Economics > Systems and Infrastructure