On the stability and quality of power grids subjected to intermittent feed-in

Abstract: Feed-in fluctuations induced by renewables are one of the key challenges to the stability and quality of electrical power grids. In particular short-term fluctuations disturb the system on a time scale, on which load balancing does not operate yet and the system is intrinsically governed by self-organized synchronization. Wind and solar power are known to be strongly non-Gaussian with intermittent increment statistics in these time scales. We investigate the impact of short-term wind fluctuations on the basis of a Kuramoto-like power grid model considering stability in terms of desynchronization and frequency and voltage quality aspects. We compare intermittent feed-in with a realistic power spectrum, correlated Gaussian noise of the same spectrum, and Gaussian white noise. We found out that the likelihood of severe outages is mainly determined by the temporal correlation of the feed-in. The intermittent nature of wind power is transferred into frequency and voltage fluctuations. This establishes a novel type of fluctuations with severe consequences on frequency and voltage quality, which are beyond engineering status of knowledge.