Reliable power forecasts help HROTE integrate renewable energy sources effectively into the Croatian electricity market.

Challenge

The development of renewable energy sources in Europe is constantly pushed on – also Croatia increasingly reaches a significant amount of electricity produced from renewables such as wind and sunlight.

The country has good natural endowments for this development. The advantages are obvious: solar and wind power are clean natural resources which are available everywhere in the country, thereby providing Croatia being independent from
other countries.

Furthermore, by improving its own energy supply, Croatia benefits from the domestic development of energy equipment and services.

Croatian electricity market operator HROTE organizes the electricity market and assumes responsibility for stimulating an increasing production of electricity from renewable energy sources.

“Currently there is 567 MW of wind power capacity installed and 60 MW of photovoltaic within our portfolio“, says Danijel Beljan, Head of the Eco Balance Group Department at HROTE. “The forecasts provide a basis for integrating renewable energy sources into the electricity market in Croatia.“

Solution

HROTE makes use of enercast’s services since May 2016. “Currently we use real time forecasts for wind power and intraday forecasts for PV within our feed-in scheme“,
outlines Danijel Beljan.

While HROTE provides enercast with new data on wind power production every hour, enercast delivers new wind power fore-casts every 15 minutes and PV forecasts for the next 10 days four times a day.

Forecast data from international meteorological services and the regular up-dates in combination with the plant’s real measurement data add to the precision of enercast’s forecasts.

Benefit

As Croatian energy market operator HROTE needs precise forecasts in order to integrate renewable energy sources effectively into the Croatian electricity market.

In the future HROTE will sell all electricity from renewable energy sources producers on the electricity market. “The forecasts enercast delivered so far have proven to be very reliable and of high quality“, says Danijel Beljan.

“Since our company is still not the responsible party for balancing renewable energy sources within the feed-in scheme, high quality forecasts do not effect reduction in our costs at the moment. Nevertheless, they effect a reduction of balancing costs in the Croatian electricity system which reduces overall costs of integrating renewable energy sources. This in turn enables further integration of renewable energy sources in Croatia.“