Economic and environmental assessment of energy systems integration for increased utilisation and reduced curtailment of offshore wind farms.

The challenge of harnessing intermittent offshore wind power to meet the variations in hourly GB demand is an immense challenge within economic and environmental constraints.

The precise make-up of the Net Zero grid for GB has infinite possibilities but my research aims to compare different scenarios to highlight the costs and benefits of each case.

The overarching goal is to discover approaches for generation, demand and storage that maximise energy efficiency by minimising curtailment of offshore wind farms.

Central to the research project is a model of the variations in half hourly electricity demand and generation within a GB Net Zero grid.

These quantities are synthetically produced from 30-years of historical GB weather data and cover the different ways in which temperature and winds can change over multiple twelve-month periods.

Many types of different energy storage systems are overlaid onto the model so that the strategies can be assessed on an economic and environmental basis.

Key to the assessment of different strategies for generation either directly or via energy storage is the economic reality for the energy provider. The free market may not be able to able to provide sufficient power to keep "the lights on" all the time.

As such different ways to facilitate end users to change demand patterns through pricing as well as the role of ancillary providers will be investigated.

The outputs for the project will be an analysis of the effectiveness of different potential strategies in reducing curtailment of offshore wind power and improving the efficiency of the generation.