How much can regional aggregation of wind farms and smart grid demand management facilitate wind energy integration?

As wind energy is one of the leading renewable energy sources but also the resource with the highest variability at many time scales, substantial integration into a national or local grid poses increasing challenges for balancing action as the proportion of wind energy to the overall supply increases. Here we analysed the residual load for supplying a two-year time series of national demand data with wind energy from sites across the network at an overall contribution ranging from zero to 100%. The demands on balancing and additional generation capacities was refined to address the needs for, and effectiveness of, balancing actions a set of time scales to represent short-term balancing, active generation and demand side management as possible in a smart grid environment, and support for the daily cycle. In particular the effect of aggregating spatially distributed wind power sources and of demand management actions smoothing out the residual load over a 3-hour window were investigated a possible tools to facilitate wind power integration.