Posters

Abstract

In preconstruction energy yield prediction studies, some loss categories are used and considered as standard assumptions. One of them is the availability of a utility grid. Utilities typically plan an average of one scheduled work for substation and transmission lines per year. Depending on several reasons, such as the region where renewable projects are to be located as well as the variety of transmission systems levels where they connect, this loss can usually range between values of 0.1% and 1% (or even higher). It is important to note that grid technical restrictions of the grid, known as grid curtailment, is not accounted in the grid availability loss. In this study, which focuses on Spain, Portugal and France, we map country-specific statistics such as population and industrial production level (obtained from Eurostat), unavailability in the transmission grid and grid infrastructure in km (obtained from REE, RTE and REN), and demand, planned and forced outage (obtained from ENTSO-E) data using publications between 2018 and 2023. One challenge is associating logically national-level grid outage and unavailability statistics with wind farm-relevant sites. For example, the Spanish grid was subject to lengthy planned outages in 2019, but having more than 1500h on average planned unavailability in some parts of the grid does not necessarily mean far away wind farms suffered from such a loss. Nevertheless, information such as planned outage months following the calendar from October to February can be derived from publicly available data. Moreover, planned outages take longer than the forced outage unavailability period; one of the interpretations is the possibility of applying for grid availability loss considering monthly profiles. The average outage duration for Spain between 2018 and 2023 is approximately 155 hours at the country level, increasing to 367 hours in France and 436 hours in Portugal.