Investigating Wind Energy Curtailment to Enable Constraint Analysis and Green Hydrogen Potential in Scotland’s Energy Infrastructure

Curtailment of renewable energy is a growing issue in global energy infrastructure. A case study is carried out to investigate wind energy curtailment occurring in Scotland, which presents a growing issue, with an increasing amount of renewable energy going to waste. Complex relationships between grid constraints and wind farm operations must be explored to maximise utilisation of low-carbon electricity and to avoid the “turn-up” of non-renewable sources. Transmission zones and boundaries are considered and mapped, and a novel method of direct measurement of curtailment for transmission-level assets is proposed, with an intuitive, reproducible approach utilising balancing mechanism data. Curtailment data is examined and combined to find national trends, explore the viability of distributed hydrogen electrolysis, and compare curtailment and constraint directly across transmission boundaries. The weaknesses of the data collection methods are considered, solutions for a future iteration are proposed, and further uses of the outputs are discovered.