Abstract: This paper presents research being undertaken as part of the EPSRC Supergen FlexNet consortium to analyse the spatial and temporal behaviour of tidal current resources.
The study explores the availability of tidal current energy at a particular location and examines its timing with respect to electricity demand. Actual performance data from a tidal device is not available; therefore a representative hypothetical device is used to simulate electrical generation output from the available tidal resource. The variability of the power generated is compared with realistic demand data and the level of perturbation is calculated.
As the study only considers generation output at one location, the importance of aggregation is highlighted. Two scenarios are presented; 10% and 20% penetration of tidal current energy generation in a small network with variability characteristics similar to the UK system demand.
Increasing penetration leads to larger power excursions in the system due to the addition of variable generation.
