The ongoing increase in renewable power generation causes a parallel overall decrease in conventional power generation from, in particular, fossil and nuclear power plants. Apart from providing market-based active power schedules, these power plants are crucial for offering ancillary services in order to guarantee a reliable stable power supply at any instant in time. Substituting these plants with renewable generation units requires the latter to be capable of providing these ancillary services. The state of the art is that grid codes are used to define the way wind turbines and wind farms have to behave when connected to the power system. In this way, they already incorporate basic ancillary services. However, frequency control is normally not provided as a regular reserve, because this would require reserving parts of the available wind capacity as stand-by capacity. Within R&D institutes, such control options were demonstrated and assessed for wind power plant clusters.@en

The European Academy of Wind Energy (eawe), representing universities and institutes with a significant wind energy programme in 14 countries, has discussed the long-term research challenges in wind energy. In contrast to research agendas addressing short- to medium-term research activities, this eawe document takes a longer-term perspective, addressing the scientific knowledge base that is required to develop wind energy beyond the applications of today and tomorrow. In other words, this long-term research agenda is driven by problems and curiosity, addressing basic research and fundamental knowledge in 11 research areas, ranging from physics and design to environmental and societal aspects. Because of the very nature of this initiative, this document does not intend to be permanent or complete. It shows the vision of the experts of the eawe, but other views may be possible. We sincerely hope that it will spur an even more intensive discussion worldwide within the wind energy community.@en