Roskilde - The EU is now launching the Twenties Project. The project is to advance the development and implementation of new technologies that will make it possible to increase the use of wind power in Europe significantly. This will contribute to the EU objective for 2020: a 20% reduction in CO2 emissions; a 20% improvement in energy efficiency, and a 20% share of consumption from renewable energy sources.

Risø DTU is going to lead the research activity of this project and assess the consequences of these solutions for the European electricity supply in 2020. Risø DTU will also participate in conducting a demonstration to show how, in case of storms, the imbalance can be addressed that occurs when an offshore wind farm stops or reduces production during stormy weather with high wind speeds.

The Twenties project will last 3 years and will count on a total budget close to 60 million Euro, of which 32 million will be financed by the European Union, in this way becoming the fifth largest project within the EU seventh Framework programme and the largest industrial energy project ever.

When a storm front hits an offshore wind farm, production may fall in 3-5 minutes from full production to zero. To predict when this is going to happen is very difficult. Together with several firms, Energinet.dk is going to demonstrate how to cope with the reduction in production, so that it does not happen suddenly, is easier to predict, and also is coordinated with a reduction of the export to Norway. The lost wind energy production is to be replaced with Norwegian hydropower production.

The electricity system can cope with these abrupt stoppages in wind energy production, because the quantity of electricity from offshore wind farms, after all, accounts for a small part of the total electricity supply. But according to plan several large wind farms will have been constructed by 2020, e.g. in the North Sea. The consequences for the electricity supply would be dramatic if the large wind farms stop almost simultaneously because of heavy storms.

"This could affect the stability of the grid causing it to be blacked out at worst unless the system is ready to handle these situations and can provide the lost production from elsewhere," says Poul Sørensen from the Wind Energy Division at Risø DTU. He is leading Risø DTU's research activity in the Twenties project.

Quelle: Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy, Technical University of Denmark (DTU)

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