A Novel Method to Valorize Frequency Support Procurement by Wind Power Plants

The provision of frequency support by renewable power is a key challenge to allow higher penetration of renewables. While the research efforts focus on proposing new control methods and market structures to realize and facilitate the provision of frequency services by wind power, less attention is given to financial compensation of proper responses. This paper proposes a comprehensive method to evaluate the net payments to participating wind power plants, including a penalty factor for responses that do not comply with grid codes and market bids. This method integrates frequency data and dynamic response of wind power assets during the events, to evaluate the compliance level under a certain grid code, and calculates the corresponding net payment. The paper demonstrates the method by integrating the worst frequency event in each month from the real recorded data of UK National Grid frequency response in 2016. The results obtained show clear diversities between the three examined support methods with clear influence of the incident wind speed. Kinetic energy extraction support method shows a little merit at high wind speeds, while pitch deloading method performs better at the majority of the examined case studies.