Energy system impact of wind power with curtailment: national- and city-scale analysis

Urban vertical farming with a large wind power share and optimised electricity costs

“…We considered two emission-free alternatives for Helsinki energy production in 2050: GAS-SYSTEM and MARKET-SYSTEM. We selected these two scenarios due to a series of studies where the most effective strategies for decarbonizing Helsinki's energy system have been shown to be by improving the flexibility of the system and incorporating wind power [29,32,38,[51][52]. The applied zero emission strategies (see Table 1) operate both existing infrastructures, such as the exogenous electricity market and on-site infrastructures (power plants).…”

“…Energy-related challenges associated with vertical farming on an urban scale are rarely discussed in existing studies. In the future, cities would most probably include large renewable energy production [32,38,51], and for different reasons, such as network limitation or a lack of the system flexibility, they may export a part of it. At the same time, VFs need renewable energy production to become sustainable technology in the future.…”

“…Defining strategies to integrate VF into urban areas requires filling this gap. City-level energy system simulations are abundant in the literature [38,[67][68][69][70][71]. For Nordic cities, there are studies examining the influence of energy demand on emission-free alternatives for urban energy systems, such as improvement in heat demand or an increase in power demand due to electric vehicles or city growth [37][38]49,51,[72][73][74].…”

“…It would thus be highly important to increase the system flexibility to counteract the negative effects of high share of VREs by e.g., converting power to heat (P2H) via heat pump (HP), demand-side management, or amplifying the energy storage [31,[33][34][35]. VRE integration and energy system flexibility have previously been shown to be key solutions for decarbonizing urban energy systems [36][37][38][39]. Still, challenges remain, such as the local consumption of wind power, reducing hourly mismatches between demand and production, and interacting optimally with the exogenous power market [40][41][42][43].…”

The Present Trends and Challenges in Renewable Energy Sources Connected to a Grid

“…Conventional producers may also not be eager or able to downscale their production more to accommodate the extra wind power. In such a case, limited flexibility in the power system could lead to curtailed wind energy [71]. Problems associated with high demand during episodes of low production of RE are not as technically demanding as those from the scenario explained above [72].…”