Impact of Wind Power Generation on European Cross-Border Power Flows

A statistical analysis is performed in order to investigate the relationship between wind power production and cross-border power transmission in Europe. A dataset including physical hourly cross-border power exchanges between European countries as dependent variables is used. Principal component analysis is employed in order to reduce the problem dimension. Then, nonlinear relationships between forecast wind power production as well as spot price in Germany, by far the largest wind power producer in Europe, and power flows are modeled using local polynomial regression. We find that both forecast wind power production and spot price in Germany have substantial nonlinear effects on power transmission on a European scale.