Effects Future Renewable Installations Will Have on System Synchronous and Synthetic Inertia

Abstract

As wind and solar displace conventional generators, concerns are growing on the effect these asynchronous generators may have on such frequency stabilization services as primary and inertial response. An investigation into the system inertia of a future European energy scenario that integrates a high percentage of renewables was done using the output of a 2030 economic dispatch model to evaluate potential problems. The dispatch model provides a realistic view of possible scheduled generator mixes for three synchronous regions in Europe, as simulated for the year 2030, and allows an analysis of the available system inertia in this future scenario. This analysis yielded a positive view into the state of the synchronous system, and suggests that wind turbine installations alone is not a good predictor of a system synchronous inertia. Also central to the analysis was an investigation of the possible ways wind turbines can contribute a synthetic inertial response in a contingency event. The literature based theoretical inertial capabilities present in wind turbines are used to estimate the resource of synthetic inertia available in future systems. This capability was aggregated after using mesoscale meteorological data for its computation. Across each of the European synchronous regions for the 2030 energy scenario, the coincidence of the synthetic inertial capability was compared to the synchronous inertial capability and the stability of those systems was investigated.