Profiling the regional wind power fluctuation in China

As China starts to build 6 10-GW wind zones in 5 provinces by 2020, accommodating the wind electricity generated from these large wind zones will be a great challenge for the regional grids. Inadequate wind observing data hinders profiling the wind power fluctuations at the regional grid level. This paper proposed a method to assess the seasonal and diurnal wind power patterns based on the wind speed data from the NASA GEOS-5 DAS system, which provides data to the study of climate processes including the long-term estimates of meteorological quantities. The wind power fluctuations for the 6 largest wind zones in China are presented with both the capacity factor and the megawatt wind power output. The measured hourly wind output in a regional grid is compared to the calculating result to test the analyzing model. To investigate the offsetting effect of dispersed wind farms over large regions, the regional correlations of hourly wind power fluctuations are calculated. The result illustrates the different offsetting effects of minute and hourly fluctuations. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.