Investigating the need for real time measurements in industrial wind power systems combined with battery storage

In simulating renewable energy systems (RES), researchers tend to focus on the modeling methodology, but less on the impact of data on the obtained results and associated conclusions. Yet, results may be particularly dependent on the data resolution. RES studies on that impact of data resolution mostly consider households with PV systems, leaving industrial sites and wind power systems out of scope. In this paper, we consider a system comprising a medium-sized wind turbine, a high power battery and an industrial load, connected to a distribution grid. Wind and load power were measured concurrently in real time at 1 s resolution for 2 months in summer 2017, at two locations in Belgium. We performed two simulations, one using the real time data at 1 s resolution and the other using the same power data averaged over 10 min intervals. We compared both simulations to calculate three metrics: total self-sufficiency error, battery utilization error and instantaneous self-sufficiency error. We repeated the analysis using different settings in terms of battery capacity, battery C rate limit and load ratio. We conclude that: (i) total self-sufficiency, in all cases, is overestimated, ranging between 0.06 and 3.6%, with errors decreasing for higher battery capacity, (ii) battery utilization is always underestimated with errors ranging between 7.5 and 44.7%, primarily depending on the C rate limit, and (iii) there is a clear correlation between instantaneous self-sufficiency error and instantaneous ratio of the averaged load and wind power, with errors exceeding 100% when the ratio ranges in 0.5–2.