The Pros And Cons Of Wind Power

Wind energy is intermittent by its nature; it is very consistent on an annual basis but varies significantly over shorter time scales and as a result it is necessary to have flexible back up generation sources on standby to cover any sudden drops or increases in its output which adds significant cost to the running of a stable electricity grid (Kessides and Wade 2011) (Hirth and Ziegenhagen 2015). This is because of instantaneous electrical generation and the consumption must remain balanced at all times to ensure grid stability, this variability creates substantial challenges when a large amount of wind energy is integrated into an electrical grid (Hirth and Ziegenhagen 2015). Transmission networks currently deal with outages of conventional power plants and instantaneous changes of electrical demand by compensating with reserve capacity (Zugno and Conejo 2015). The variability of renewable power sources such as wind power, are unlike those of conventional power generation plants but can be partially compensated for in the same way (Chao et al. 2015).
This variability causes complications on the grid because of the need to
Currently grid systems with large amounts integrated wind energy requires there to be an increase in the number of natural gas spinning reserve power plants in operation to prevent a loss of electricity in the event of unforeseen circumstances that are not favourable for wind energy generation (Oko and Wang 2014). When there is a lower percentage of wind energy integrated by the grid there is less of an issue (Oko and Wang 2014).
The purpose of this project is to highlight the possible solutions for the problems caused by the variability of wind and other renewable energy