Increasing penetration of renewable sources into Power System in Poland

Increased Penetration of the Polish Power Supply System by renewable sources (RES) leads to a number of serious and new problems. The problems are associated with evacuating energy from producers (particularly visible for PV installations), change in the direction of power flow in the lines of the transmission and distribution system, problems with balancing energy production in the system related to uncertainty production of RES and a limitations in the possibility of control range of classic power plants. The current EU legislation leading to the increase of RES penetration will cause a significant rise appearance of in these problems. In principle these problems are unsolvable without the use of effective and achievable on a large scale methods and technologies of energy storage. The article estimates the generation level, generation variability and possible shortages in wind energy production in Poland in the case of the expansion of wind farms into offshore farms on the Baltic Sea. Data used in paper are based on some years of work inland RES in Poland available from PSE site. The idea is to adjust an operation of the power system to the basic formula of energy production and consumption balance with the required stability margins. A simple algorithm for estimating the size of the energy reserve necessary to stabilize the operation of the power system has been proposed. An important problem is also the assessment of the "geographical premium" (location). Theoretically, with the growth of the analyzed RES production area, the stability of DER production should increase since it become independent from purely local weather conditions.