To Jump or not to Jump - Impact of Renewables and Trading on Power Grid Frequency fluctuations

Published by MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR DYNAMICS UND SELF-ORGANIZATION
Co-published: TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITÄT DRESDEN / CFAED – CENTER FOR ADVANCING ELECTRONICS DRESDEN

Our daily life depends more than ever on a reliable electrical supply. However, the ongoing energy transition poses new challenges to the electrical power grid and its operators. For the integration of additional renewable generation into the power grid, it is often proposed to split the grid into smaller autonomous cells, also called “microgrids”. Thereby, a village with a combined heat and power unit and added wind and photovoltaic generators could operate mostly independently without drawing energy from the grid. But how does splitting a large grid into smaller cells and adding more renewable generators affect the reliability of the electrical supply? Benjamin Schäfer and Marc Timme, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen and the Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed) at Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, analysed power grid frequency fluctuation in different regions in the world together with colleagues from the Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany), Queen Mary University of London (Great Britain) and the University of Tokyo (Japan). They formulated mathematical models to predict the effect of power fluctuations on the grid frequency. The results are now published in the article „Non-Gaussian Power Grid Frequency Fluctuations Characterized by Lévy-stable Laws and Superstatistics“, at Nature Energy.