Assessment of the Firmness of the Wind Technology

Abstract

The electricity sector is facing an unprecedented transition. In the past, the power sector used to have the certainty about the availability of the sufficient resources in the system by attracting investors through economic signals that involved low risk investments and stable incomes. However, this traditional framework has been modified in the last decade. First, the liberalization of the traditional framework modified the investors’ risk that until that time the agents used to face; and after, the disruption of the traditional generation mix, by the arrival of the renewable technologies with low variable cost, that reduce the income of the traditional agents involved. The establishment of this new paradigm involves facing new challenges that allow achieving the new model without a sharp break with the traditional model. Thus, the regulators and the responsible agents of each system try to implement different solutions that allow to evolve the system in a softly way. One of the main challenges that the regulators face is related with the current concern about the firmness of the system. Therefore in the last years different mechanisms have been established in order to guarantee the desired level of firmness in the system whereas economic signals are sent to the investors, in order to attract them to provide the service. The main objective of this project is to determine a methodology that evaluate the contribution of the different technologies to the firmness of the power system in order to allow all of them to participate in the remuneration mechanism already established by the regulators to tackle with the reliability problem. The methodology has been assessed with the Wind Technology because is one of the technologies that has been more developed in the last years, presents a decoupling between installed and firm capacity and also because in some countries its participation is not allowed due to some vague arguments against its variability.