Impact of system power losses on the value of an offshore grid for North Sea offshore wind

Grid connection is a critical factor for the integration of large scale wind power. This factor is even more important in the framework of transnational power exchange which is a way to improve power system operation. In this paper a comparison study has been carried out between two different grid building strategies for offshore wind farms in the North Sea using the 2030 medium wind scenario from the TradeWind project. These strategies are i) radial and ii) meshed grid configuration. The paper has considered active power losses for both strategies and capture the effect of losses on different power system aspects, such as the total soci-economic benefit associated with each strategy, offshore wind power utilization, power exchange between the grid points, grid bottlenecks and utilization of HVDC connections. Using a meshed grid compared to radial there will be a total benefit of 2.7 billion Euro over the economic life time of the grid. However this benefit will be increased by 0.3 billion Euro by taking into account the grid losses for both cases. The results shows the benefit of using meshed offshore grid for future European power system with a large penetration of off- and onshore wind power.