A comprehensive review on wind power spillage: Reasons, minimization techniques, real applications, challenges, and future trends

Most countries tend to largely exploit renewable energy resources for economic and environmental reasons. In modern electrical networks, wind penetration has been tremendously increased. This phenomenon has triggered an accelerating advance in wind technology with huge industry investments. Nowadays, increasing wind penetration without endangering power system reliability and security becomes a serious issue. Due to the significant uncertainty and variation of wind power generation (WPG), increasing wind penetration levels leads to frequency variation, voltage instability, and exceeding the transmission capacity limitations. To override the aforementioned problems, it becomes crucial either to “spill” wind or add a new dispatchable generation and/or storage systems. Performing a new dispatch provides an additional regulation and load following services. Recently, a significant amount of wind power spillage (WPS) exists in practice especially with high penetration level of WPG. Actually, WPS signifies the amount of the unused WPG because of technical problems such as grid congestion and lack of spinning reserve as well as during lower demand periods. WPS greatly lower the capacity factor of the wind power plant and lower its value. Over the last decade, possible mitigation strategies to solve the WPS problem have been tackled and conducted. This paper presents a comprehensive literature review of the WPS problem and state-of-the-art solutions to minimize WPS without compromising the power system's stability and secure operation. Additionally, the real applications, challenges, and future trends in the WPS research area are explored.