Facts & Figures

History

In the fall of 1999, two Ph.D. students at the Department for Electric Power Systems of the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden spent many hours discussing the integration of wind power into power systems and possible applications of HVDC technology for offshore wind farms. It soon became clear that these topics would interest and require a wider audience including experts from the wind industry. The result was the International Workshop on Feasibility of HVDC Transmission Networks for Offshore Wind Farms organized at the Royal Institute of Technology in spring 2000.

Over the past years the key topics changed continuously, reflecting the shifting focuses in the area of wind integration, for instance modeling issues, national grid integration experience, market issues as well as grid code issues became key topics of the workshop. In October 2011, for the celebration of the 10th International Workshop the workshop was held for the first time together with the 1st Solar Integration Workshop (www.solarintegrationworkshop.org).

By 2014, this workshop has developed into one of the premier conferences in its field, providing an excellent platform for discussing the subject of grid integration of wind power into the existing power systems under the renamed workshop title International Workshop on Large-Scale Integration of Wind Power into Power Systems as well as on Transmission Networks for Offshore Wind Power Plants. By the way, in 2013, Grid Integration Experiences and Wind Integration Studies have been the most popular topics of the workshop, followed by Grid Code Issues, Frequency Control Issues and Grid Integration Technologies.

Purpose of the workshop/Target groups

The general purpose of this workshop, however, has not changed over the past years: It is to get researchers, economists and practicing engineers from different fields relating to wind power and transmission systems to exchange their knowledge and discuss their experience in the area of large-scale integration of wind power into power systems and transmission networks for offshore wind farms. The emphasis of this workshop is on both theoretical discussion and practical applications.

The workshop provides an international forum to

• discuss project experiences
• discuss innovative ideas and present results from ongoing research
• stimulate interdisciplinary thinking between wind energy and power transmission industries, as well as universities
• identify subjects requiring more research efforts

Presentations

Presentations are held by invited speakers from companies and leading research institutes as well as by workshop participants (Call for papers).

Participants

The locations and numbers of participants of past workshops as well as its development can be seen in Figure 1 and Figure 2. Figure 2 also describes the development of the number of participating countries.

 

Figure 1: Location and Number of Participants of Past Workshops

 

Figure 2: Number of participants and participating countries for each Workshop

 

The following figures give you some details about the past Wind Integration Workshop in London/UK. Figure 3 shows that the share of participants from Germany and the hosting country is relatively high, which has been the case at past workshops as well.

 

Figure 3: Participants by country at the Wind Integration Workshop in London/UK (2013)

 

Figure 4: Structure of participants based on organization type at the Wind Workshop in London/UK (2013)

 

Figure 5: How participants became aware of the Wind Workshop in London/UK (2013)

 

The affiliation of the participants has been showing a surprisingly even distribution (see Table 1 and Figure 4) during the past years. This distribution confirms the organizers' intention to provide a combined forum for academic/scientific institutions and industry experts.

Table 1: Structure of participants based on organization type (2008-2013)