Data sensitivities for variable renewable energy curtailment estimation

As the penetration of variable renewable production increases on systems, the potential need to curtail the output of variable renewables to ensure system integrity increases. The need for these curtailments is primarily due to three factors: firstly, the need for system balance, secondly the need for sufficient system services such as inertia and lastly, as a result of congestion arising from limitations of the transmission network. This paper presents a methodology for modeling these types of curtailments in production cost studies. The methodology is applied to the power system of Ireland and examines the sensitivity of curtailment estimates to spatial and temporal wind data.