Economic Viability and Technical Challenges of Integrating Offshore Wind Energy with Microgrids

Offshore wind power could play an important role in providing energy and food to the world. However, economic viability and technological issues still prevent offshore wind from being widely implemented by industry. This paper presents the development of an analysis platform for economic viability studies of offshore wind turbine systems. It indicates the necessity of developing a self-sustained renewable energy hub that contains both renewable power generations and the energy end users. This hub can be viewed as an inertia-less microgrid vulnerable to power disturbances. The impact of wind power’s intermittence on the grid frequency stability is subsequently evaluated, and a control framework that helps maintain the grid frequency stability in both the short and long terms is presented. Case studies were conducted to demonstrate the utility of the developed framework.