A spatially and temporally highly resolved analysis of wind power potentials in Austria

Abstract

The Austrian energy action plan 2010 aims at increasing annual wind power production by 3 TWh until 2020. A recent study assessed optimal locations for wind power plants based on the calculation of production costs derived from wind speeds modeled in a spatially explicit way for Austria. However, wind power production, as any other intermittent renewable power source, can be highly variable due the stochastic nature of wind. This may incur additional costs for regulating power or storage devices. Selecting wind power production sites by minimizing the variability of joint power output may be one way to manage intermittency. We have generated synthetic time series of wind power production using data from a wind atlas and meteorological stations. We used the time series in an optimization model to analyze how variability in the output of newly added wind turbines can be decreased by diversifying the sites of wind farms. Results indicate that hourly variability as well as seasonal variability can be reduced by diversification of turbine sites, however, there is a trade-off. Model results indicate that diversification will reduce rents of wind turbine developers by increasing costs although all assessed sites are profitable when considering current feed-in tariffs. This implies that regulators could increase the usability of wind power plants by taking into account diversification of locations without increasing costs for consumers.1