Abstract
Wind power fluctuations for an individual turbine and plant have been widely reported to follow the Kolmogorov spectrum of atmospheric turbulence; both vary with a fluctuation time scale as . Yet, this scaling has not been explained through turbulence theory. Using turbines as probes of turbulence, we show the scaling results from a large scale influence of atmospheric turbulence. Owing to this long-range influence spanning 100s of kilometers, when power from geographically distributed wind plants is summed into aggregate power at the grid, fluctuations average (geographic smoothing) and their scaling steepens from , beyond which further smoothing is not possible. Our analysis demonstrates grids have already reached this spectral limit to geographic smoothing.
- Received 15 September 2016
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.028301
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
Published by the American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Synopsis
Gusts in the Wind
Published 13 January 2017
A turbulence-based model of wind variations explains observed fluctuations in the power output from wind turbines.
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