On Embedded Energy Storage for high penetration of wind power

It is recognised that to enable high penetration of wind power it is essential for modern wind farms to meet some technical requirements. These requirements are specified, or planned to be included, in grid codes by some utilities around the world. In this paper it is shown that having an Embedded Energy Storage (EES) unit, a battery bank, in a wind turbine can help to meet these requirements and to reduce the overall wind farm development and system integration costs. A case study is presented in this paper. This is based on (a) the statistics of the wind speeds measured at Dunstaffnage, Scotland, (b) the manufacturers´ data of a turbine generator, and (c) some mild assumptions used for the calculations. This case study shows that, for the same amount of wind energy annual output and a specified frequency control requirement: the delta production constraint, a wind farm of 50 wind turbines can be replaced by 10 wind turbines with an EES in each of them plus 33 ordinary wind turbines. The further research into EES, apart from some technical details, includes some policy issues which are also addressed in this paper.