Estimating the real contribution of wind parks on covering the Greek mainland load demand

During the last ten years, there is a significant wind power increase in the national electricity generation fuel mix, since the current (end of 2023) national installed wind power capacity exceeds 5.2 GWe in comparison with the 1.9 GWe of 2013. Moreover, according to the revised NPEC (October 2023) the expected wind power by 2030 may exceed 9.5 GWe. Although this continuous wind power time evolution seems to favour the clean-green electricity production, significant wind power absorption problems have been appeared during the last two years. Keep also in mind that the average annual load demand of the mainland electrical system (2023) is approximately 5700 GWe, a value that is comparable with the already installed wind power capacity. In this context, the proposed work presents a detailed hourly statistical analysis of the Greek wind parks participation to cover the mainland load demand for the period 2016-2021. This specific period has been selected since during this period there was not any systematic wind power curtailment, hence it may be used to estimate the real capacity credit of the wind power in the national electricity generation system (EGS). Using the proposed analysis, the hourly contribution of the wind energy in the national EGS has been investigated and the capacity credit of the existing wind parks has been estimated on monthly and annual basis. On monthly basis, the minimum capacity credit values have been encountered from April to July, while the maximum values appear mainly during winter. Consequently, on annual basis, the average capacity credit is slightly higher than 20%, while a deceasing trend has been observed as the installed wind power is increasing.