DC9: The mutual impact of AWE based plants on the electricity grid

Objectives

AWE will produce electrical power, which must be fed into the power grid. The distribution grid, where the feed-in usually takes place, is already facing several challenges with fluctuating generation from existing wind power plants or PV. This behaviour will intensify in the future, as the ratio of renewable (and often volatile) generation to conventional and schedulable generation increases. AWE has a different feed-in characteristic and several ways it can provide grid services. This DC will investigate the mutual impact of grid stability issues, increasing AWE penetration and AWE based grid services. As a first step, the research will look at distinctive configurations of different electricity grids in Europe and the different requirements they would impose on AWE based plants. Second, given the power generation characteristic of the different AWE concepts, and individual plant configurations (range of plant power and number of aircraft), the research will look at how increasing the penetration will impact grid stability on these different grids. The optimal power classes, cluster sizes, or distribution will be derived. The research will also look at how different AWE based grid services can be used to strengthen the grid. These will be applied in network calculations on real grid topologies to evaluate the potential of AWE to support grid stability.

Expected Results

(1) Feed-in characteristic of AWE depending on environmental and design parameters; (2) parameter set to trigger a grid-serving behaviour of AWE; (3) potential to balance power consumption or generation peaks in existing distribution grids.

Supervisory team

Stephanie Uhrig is main supervisor, Christoph M. Hackl and Roland Schmehl are co-supervisors.

Planned secondment

Kitepower (M37-M42), to collaborate with DC7 to investigate the impact of various AWE operation strategies on grid stability and compliance, supervised by Claudio Vergara.