Offshore Variability in Critical Weather Conditions in

Large-Scale Wind Based Danish Power System

Nicolaos A. Cutululis, Member, IEEE
Marisciel Litong-Palima Nina Detlefsen
Poul Sørensen, Senior Member, IEEE Department of System planning and operation
DTU Wind Energy Energinet.dk
Technical University of Denmark Denmark
niac@dtu.dk, mlit@dtu.dk, posq@dtu.dk nid@energinet.dk

Abstract—Offshore wind power has a significant development coast.

potential, especially in North Europe. The geographical
concentration of offshore wind power leads to increased
variability and in the case of critical weather conditions it may
lead to sudden and considerable loss of production. In this
context, the chances of losing several GW of wind power due to
critical weather conditions in a very short time period could
potentially jeopardize the whole system’s reliability and
stability. Forecasting such events is not trivial and the results so
far are not encouraging. When assessing the impact of the
variability for the 2020 Danish power system, one can see that in
the worst case, up to 1500 MW of power can be lost in 30
minutes. We present results showing how this issue is partially
solved by the new High Wind Storm Controller presented by
Siemens in the TWENTIES project.

Index Terms— Control, Forecasting, Offshore, Power Systems,

Wind energy

I. INTRODUCTION
Wind power is currently the most promising renewable
technology and is expected to contribute significantly to
achieving the “20-20-20” target set by EU - 20% reduction
of greenhouse gases and 20% share of renewables by 2020
[1].
The development potential of wind power, especially
offshore, is huge. According to the latest estimations,
offshore wind power could reach an installed capacity of 40- Figure 1. Proposed sites for future offshore wind farms in Denmark [3]
55 GW by 2020 in North Europe [2].
In Denmark, a commission under the Danish Energy In addition to these Danish sites, Germany and the
Authority has issued “Future Offshore Wind Farm Sites – Netherlands also plan to continue their offshore wind power
2025” [3], appointing a number of potential sites for large development in the North Sea close to the Danish wind farms.
offshore wind farms, taking into account water depth, wind Therefore, under critical weather conditions, the wind power
resources, grid connection and other important issues. variability is becoming critical.
The proposed Danish offshore wind power sites are This issue is addressed in a very large European project.
indicated in Fig. 1. Each circle corresponds to a 200 MW The TWENTIES project (www.twenties-project.eu) aims at
wind farm, which means that approximately 2.4 GW wind “demonstrating by early 2014 through real life, large scale
farms including the existing ones could be concentrated in an demonstrations, the benefits and impacts of several critical
area of approximately 50 km × 100 km west to the Danish technologies required to improve the pan-European
The works and developments required for the elaboration of this transmission network, thus giving Europe a capability of
paper/article have been carried out partially within TWENTIES project responding to the increasing share of renewable in its energy
(www.twenties-project.eu) which belongs to the Seventh Framework mix by 2020 and beyond while keeping its present level of
Program funded by European Commission under project no.
ENER/FP7EN/249812/”TWENTIES”.

978-1-4799-1303-9/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE

reliability performance” [4]. One of the demonstrations in
TWENTIES is the Storm Management demonstration. The
objective of this demonstration is: “The occurrence of storms
will raise new challenges when it comes to secure operation
of the whole European electric system with future large scale
offshore wind power. With the present control schemes,
storms will lead to sudden wind plant shut downs, which in
turn is a threat to the whole system security, unless standby
reserves are ready to take over power demands under very
short notice. The challenge that this demonstration is
addressing is to balance the wind power variability, operating
the transmission grid securely during such storm conditions.
The more specific objectives of the demonstration are to:
• Demonstrate secure power system control during
storm passage, using hydro power plants in Norway to
balance storm shut down of Horns Rev 2 [5] wind
farm in Denmark.
• Use existing forecast portfolio available to the TSO to
monitor and plan the down regulation of large scale
offshore wind power during storm passages.
• Provide more flexible wind turbine and wind farm
control during storms.”
Energinet.dk, as a TSO, is responsible for the
transmission and permanent balance between production and
consumption, even if it does not own or operate directly any
generating or consuming facilities. All production and
consumption entities plan their production or consumption
and are obliged to send in detailed schedules. These
schedules are continuously updated.
Based on the schedules Energinet.dk calculates the
system’s imbalance and can trade this in the regulating power
market. If production facilities deviate from the schedules –
which often is the case in a storm situation – Energinet.dk
will see a sudden imbalance that has to be taken cared of,
either by slow manual reserves or by automatic reserves.
Energinet.dk has meteorological forecasts available and
calculates its own wind power forecasts optimized to
minimize the aggregated wind power imbalances.
Meteorological forecasts from DMI's HIRLAM model are
updated every 6 hours.
II. STORM CONTROL
When wind speed is becoming too strong, wind turbines
are shutdown to prevent damage due to extreme mechanical
loads. The typical power curve of a modern wind turbine is
presented in Figure 2. The typical value for which a wind
turbine will initiate shut-down is when the 10-minute average
nacelle anemometer wind speed reaches 25 m/s (V4) and they
will restart when the measured wind speed drops below 20
m/s (V3). Consequently, an extreme wind period (EWP) is
defined to be the one in which the storm control is active and
is considered to occur when the wind speed exceeds the cut-
out speed and lasts until the wind speed drops below the cut-
in speed.
Figure 2. Typical wind turbine power curve including storm control
III. FORECASTING
Critical weather conditions that could lead to sudden stop
of wind power production are well defined at the wind
turbine level and are based on wind speed. Namely, when the
wind speed becomes too high, i.e. more than 25 m/s for the
10 min average, then the wind turbine stops in order to
protect the mechanical parts. Forecasting storms, on the other
hand, is rather difficult, especially when the focus is on
forecasting events that would cause an entire offshore wind
farm to stop. Experience has shown that this could be a very
local event, with one offshore wind farm going from full
production to zero, while another offshore wind farm, 5 km
away continuing to produce at maximum power.
The performance of existing forecast tools has been
analysed in many studies, but using performance indicators
such as RMSE (root mean square error) and MAE (mean
average error). These indicators are useful for normal
operation, but much less relevant for storm forecasts. In this
analysis, focus will be on predicting the time where the wind
turbine will need to shut down to protect itself, e.g. the time
where wind speed exceeds 25 m/s. At the same time, the
planned shutdown should cost as little lost of wind energy as
possible. Therefore, the planned shut down time should be as
close as possible to the time where the wind turbine itself
would shut down, but still reliable. An analysis of the
performance of the forecast system used by Energinet.dk to
predict the time when Horns Rev 2 offshore wind farm will
likely shut down due to very high wind speeds was performed
in [6]. The main conclusion of the analysis is that the wind
speed forecasts are not very reliable in predicting when Horns
Rev 2 wind farm will stop producing due to a storm. One of
the reasons for this is the fact that there is no clear and precise
definition of Extreme Wind Period (EWP) at the wind farm
level (how many wind turbines should stop producing in order
to consider it an EWP) and that the available wind speed
forecasts are given as a mean wind speed over a rather large
area. At the wind power level, the analysis shows that
prediction of accurate production levels from a wind farm
experiencing EWP is rather poor. This is partially because the
power curve typically used to transform wind speed into
power has not been optimized for high wind speeds. This
means that today, the wind power forecast error that the
TSO’s control room is facing when dealing with EWPs is
around 1 p.u.
 28
measured
forecasted
26

24
Speed [m/s]

22

20

18

16
19:00 20:00 21:00 22:00 23:00 00:00 01:00 02:00
7/8 Feb 2011

Figure 3. 1-min measured vs forecasted wind speed Figure 5. Offshore wind farms in Denmark in 2020 scenario

In order to have a statistically valid image of the reserves

Measured requirements, a number of critical weather events were
1 Forecast simulated. The list of those events is given in TABLE I.

0.8

2001 01/01/2001 2008 21/03/2008

Power [p.u.]

0.6 2005 02/01/2005 13/08/2008

2007 01/01/2007 08/11/2008
0.4
08/01/2007 2009 11/06/2009
18/03/2007 03/10/2009
0.2
27/06/2007 2010 11/11/2010
0
08/11/2007 07/02/2010
18:00 19:00 20:00 21:00 22:00 23:00 00:00 01:00
7-8 Feb 2011 2008 25/01/2008 2011 10/03/2011
27/02/2008
Figure 4. Measured versus hourly intra-day forecast wind power
TABLE I. CRITICAL WEATHER PERIODS
An example of that is given in Figure 3. and Figure 4.
The simulations were done with the CorWind power time
where the measured vs forecasted wind speed and power are
series simulation model, developed at the DTU Wind Energy
given for an EWP that happened during the night of February
[8]. CorWind can simulate wind power time series over a
7th 2011. One can clearly see that the hourly updated wind
large area such as a power system region and in time scales
power forecast available in the control room did not manage
where the wind turbines can be represented by simple steady
to predict the total wind farm shut down.
state power curves, i.e. typically greater than a few seconds.
IV. UPSCALE OF CRITICAL WEATHER IMPACT CorWind can be used e.g. for comparison of the impact of the
In order to be able to assess the impact that a critical site selection of future wind farms on the system reserves
weather front will have on the secure operation of a large- requirements.
scale windbased power system, the storm control was CorWind is an extension of the linear and purely
simulated to an upscaled Danish power system. The stochastic PARKSIMU model [9], which simulates stochastic
simulations were done for the 2020 offshore wind power wind speed time series for individual wind turbines in a wind
development scenario for Denmark presented in details in [7]. farm, with fluctuations of each time series according to
Under those scenarios, the offshore wind power in Denmark specified power spectral densities and with correlations
will reach 2.811 MW in the base case and 3.211 MW in the between the different wind turbine time series according to
high wind scenario. The geographical distribution of those specified coherence functions. The coherence functions
wind farms is shown in Figure 5. depend on frequency and space, ensuring that the correlation
between two wind speed time series will decrease with
increasing distance between the points. Moreover, the slow
wind speed fluctuations are more correlated than the fast
fluctuations. Finally, the stochastic PARKSIMU model
includes the phase shift between correlated waves in
downstream points, ensuring that correlated wind speed
variations will be delayed in time as they travel through the
wind farm. These model properties ensure that the summed
power from multiple wind turbines will have realistic
fluctuations, which has been validated using measured time
series of simultaneous wind speeds and power from
individual wind turbines in two large wind farms in Denmark
[10] and [11].
The CorWind extension of PARKSIMU is intended to
allow simulations over a large areas and long time periods.
The linear approach applied in PARKSIMU assumes constant
Figure 6. Definition of reserves requirements
mean wind speeds and constant mean wind directions during
a simulation period, which limits the geographical area as
well as the simulation period significantly – typically to the 1

area of a single wind farm and to a maximum period of two 0.9

10 - 90 min periods

hours. CorWind uses reanalysis data from a climate model to 0.8

provide the mean wind flow over a large region, and then 0.7
adds a stochastic contribution using an adapted version of the
0.6
PARKSIMU approach that allows the mean flow to vary in

Power [pu]
time and space. 0.5

The meteorological data come from a climate simulation 0.4 Increasing period

using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model 0.3

and the dynamical downscaling technique developed by 0.2

Hahmann et al [12], but using Newtonian relaxation terms
0.1
toward the large-scale analysis (also known as grid or
analysis nudging). Initial and boundary conditions and the 0
0 5 10 15 20 25
Duration [%]
30 35 40 45 50

gridded fields used in the nudging are taken from the NCEP
reanalysis [13] at 2.5° × 2.5° resolution. The sea surface Figure 7. Duration curves of reserves for different time windows
temperatures are obtained from the dataset of Reynolds et al
[14] at 0.25° horizontal resolution and temporal resolution of
1 day. The simulation covers the period from 1 January 1999 2500

to 31 December 2011 with hourly outputs. The model is run 1st percentile
5th percentile

on an outer grid of spatial resolution of 45 km and a nested 2000

10th percentile

grid of 15km, respectively. The data from the inner domain,

which covers most of Northern Europe, is used in this study. 1500
In this work, the main results were quantified in terms of
Power [MW]

reserve requirements. The definition of reserve requirements

applied in this paper is quite similar to the definition of 1000

regulation applied in [15] and [8]. The intention is to quantify

the difference between the instantaneous power and the mean 500

value that are dealt with as ramping. Since the reserves must
be allocated in advance, the positive reserve requirement is
defined as the difference between the initial mean value and 0
10 20 30 40 50
Period [min]
60 70 80 90

the minimum value in the next period. Formally, the reserve

requirements are defined as (see also Figure 6. ):
Figure 8. 1st, 5th and 10th percentile vs time

Pramp (n) = Pmean (n) − Pmin (n + 1)
(1)
Note that with this definition, positive reserves means
decreasing wind power that requires positive reserves from
other power plants.
The duration curves of the reserves requirements,
calculated for different time windows.,from 10 to 90 minutes,
in 5 minute steps, are given in Fig. 7.
Nevertheless, the part that is of most interest is the “worst-
case” scenario, namely the part close to the tail of the
distribution, the 1% in this case. The 1st percentile, together
with the 5th and 10th, are shown in Figure 8. One can notice
that, in the worst case, around 1500 MW can be lost in 30
minutes, with this number going up to 2000 MW lost in one
hour.
V. HIGH WIND RIDE THROUGH™ CONTROLLER
During the project, Siemens Wind Power has developed,
tested, implemented and certified a new storm controller,
called High Wind Ride Though (HRWT). Today, the HWRT
controller is implemented in all wind turbines in the large
offshore wind farm of Horns Rev 2, in Denmark. The
controller ensures that the turbines are slowly ramped down
when wind speed reaches or goes above 25 m/s, so a sudden
shutdown of an entire park is avoided. The controller ramps
the actual power and generator speed down relative to the
wind speed with a full cut-out at 31 m/s. The controller has as
inputs the rotor speed and the pitch reference. A more
detailed description of it can be found in [16].
For the upscaling part, a parameterization of the HWRT
controller has resulted in the power curve shown in Figure 9.
Until a new EWP is recorded in Horns Rev 2 wind farm,
after the implementation of the new HWRT controller,
simulations for the old EWP, recorded with the old storm
controller, were performed.
1.2
1 OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES. Brussels,.
Power [p.u.]
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0 [5]
0 10 20 30
Wind speed [m/s]
Figure 9. HWRT controller power curve parameterization
November 11 2010
1.2
1 August 2007.
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
measured power
HWRT simulated power
12:00 18:00
Figure 10. Measured vs HWRT simulated power
For example, for the EWP that was recorded on
November 11, 2010, the total wind farm output power was
simulated using the individual wind speeds, as recorded in the
wind turbine nacelles, and the new HRWT power curve. The
result is presented in Figure 10. It is easily observed that, with
the HWRT the wind farm would not shut down at all, but
actually continue producing almost as nothing had happened.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
Wind power variability under critical weather conditions
is raising concerns regarding the stability of the power
systems, especially when deployment of large scale offshore
wind power is considered. The analysis presented in this
paper shows that forecasting EWP is not very reliable and,
with the present way of dealing with EWP’s, the Danish
power system could face a loss of 1500 MW of offshore wind
power in 30 minutes, or even up to 2000 MW in one hour.
Such an extreme event could therefore pose serious
challenges to the secure and stable operation of the power
system. The new HWRT controller, presented by Siemens in
the TWENTIES project seems to have at least partially solved
the problems. Preliminary simulations show that the impact
of EWP is greatly reduced.
REFERENCES
[1] 20 20 by 2020. Europe's climate change opportunity COMMISSION
[2] EWEA, Pure Power, Wind Energt Targets for 2020 and 2030, Brussels,
2011 [Online] Available:
http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/documents/publicatio
ns/reports/Pure_Power_III.pdf
[3] Future offshore wind power sites – 2025 (in Danish). Danish Energy
Agency, Ministry of Climate and Energy, April 2007.
[4] www.twenties-project.eu
Horns Rev 2 Wind farm [Online] Available:
40 http://www.dongenergy.com/Hornsrev2/EN/Pages/Index.aspx
[6] NA. Cutululis, A. Hahmann, MH. Bjerge, A. Gøttig, LH. Hansen, N.
Detlefsen, P. Sørensen, ”Assessment of storm forecasting”, D6.1,
TWENTIES project, www.twenties-project.eu, June 2011
[7] NA. Cutululis, M. Litong-Palima, L. Zeni, A. Gøttig, N. Detlefsen, P.
Sørensen, “Offshore Wind Power Data”, D16.2, TWENTIES project,
www.twenties-project.eu, April 2012.
[8] P. Sørensen, NA Cutululis, A. Vigueras-Rodríguez, LE Jensen, J.
Hjerrild, MH. Donovan, H. Madsen, ”Power fluctuations from large
wind farms”, IEEE Trans. On Power Systems, 22(3), pp. 958-965,
[9] P. Sørensen, A. D. Hansen, P. A. C. Rosas, ”Wind models for
simulation of power fluctuations from wind farms”, J. Wind Eng. Ind.
Aerodyn. (2002) (no.90) , 1381-1402
[10] P. Sørensen, N.A. Cutululis, A. Vigueras-Rodriguez, H. Madsen, P.
Pinson, L.E. Jensen, J. Hjerrild, M.H. Donovan. Modelling of Power
Fluctuations from Large Offshore Wind Farms. Wind Energy (2008)
11, 29-43
[11] A. Vigueras-Rodriguez, P. Sørensen, NA. Cutululis, A. Viedma, MH.
Donovan, “Wind model for low frequency power fluctuations in
offshore wind farms”, Wind Energy, 13(5), pp: 471-482, July 2010.
[12] Hahmann, A. N., D. Rostkier-Edelstein, T. T. Warner, Y. Liu, F.
00:00 Vandenberghe, Y. Liu, R. Babarsky, and S. P. Swerdlin, 2010: A
reanalysis system for the generation of mesoscale climatographies. J.
Appl. Meteor. Climatol., 49, 954-972.
[13] Kanamitsu, M., W. Ebisuzaki, J. Woollen, S.-K. Yang, J. J. Hnilo, M.
Fiorino, and G. L. Potter, 2002: NCEP–DOE AMIP-II Reanalysis (R-
2). Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 83, 1631–1643.
[14] Reynolds, R. W., N. A. Rayner, T. M. Smith, D. C. Stokes, and W. Q.
Wang, 2002: An improved in situ and satellite SST analysis for climate.
J. Climate, 15, 1609–1625.
[15] Parson, M. Milligan, B. Zavadil, D. Brooks, B. Kirby, K. Dragoon, J.
Caldwell, “Grid Impacts of Wind Power: A summary of recent studies
in the United States,” Wind Energy , vol. 7, Apr./Jun. 2004, pp 87-108.
[16] PM Christiansen, MS Jensen, “Test and verification of Storm Control”,
D12.1, TWENTIES project, www.twenties-project.eu, January 2013.