Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. 1 ABSTRACT Wind generation's contribution to meeting extreme peaks in electricity demand is a key concern for the integration of wind power. In Great Britain (GB), robustly assessing this contribution directly from power system data (i.e., metered wind-supply and electricity demand) is difficult as extreme peaks occur infrequently (by definition) and measurement records are both short and inhomogeneous.Atmospheric circulation-typing combined with meteorological reanalysis data is proposed as a means to address some of these difficulties, motivated by a case study of the extreme peak demand events in January 2010. A preliminary investigation of the physical and statistical properties of these circulation types suggests that they can be used to identify the conditions that are most likely to be associated with extreme peak demand events.Three broad cases are highlighted as requiring further investigation. The "High-overBritain" anticyclone, is found to be generally associated with very low winds but relatively moderate temperatures (and therefore moderate peak demands, somewhat in contrast to the classic "low-wind cold-snap" that is sometimes apparent in the literature). In contrast, both longitudinally-extended blocking over Scotland/Scandinavia and latitudinally-extended troughs over western Europe appear to be more closely linked to the very cold GB temperatures (usually associated with extreme peak demands). In both of these latter situations, wind-resource averaged across GB appears to be more moderate.1