Towards uncovering the structure of power fluctuations of wind farms

The structure of the turbulence-driven power fluctuations in a wind farm is fundamentally described from basic concepts. A derived tuning-free model, supported with experiments, reveals the underlying spectral content of the power fluctuations of a wind farm. It contains two power-law trends and oscillations in the relatively low-and high-frequency ranges. The former is mostly due to the turbulent interaction between the flow and the turbine properties, whereas the latter is due to the advection between turbine pairs. The spectral wind-farm scale power fluctuations Phi(P) exhibit a power-law decay proportional to f(-5/3-2) in the region corresponding to the turbulence inertial subrange and at relatively large scales, Phi(P) similar to f(-2). Due to the advection and turbulent diffusion of large-scale structures, a spectral oscillation exists with the product of a sinusoidal behavior and an exponential decay in the frequency domain.