A Grid of Multiple Wind Farms Can Stabilise Electrical Output. (April 6, 2010)

The electricity generated by one wind turbine is subject to large fluctuations because of the erratic nature of local conditions and a given wind farm, even a large one will show large variations in output over time. Therefore, it has been proposed that in order to balance generation, linking up wind farms to take advantage of wind variability across a wider area should be cosidered.

ScienceNow reports that energy policy analyst and electrical engineer Willett Kempton of the University of Delaware, Newark, and colleagues have done an extensive analysis. Professor Kempton says: "Instead of just looking at the statistics of connecting turbines we also decided to look at the meteorology."

And according to  ScienceNow:

They compiled 5 years of wind data from 11 offshore weather-monitoring stations buoyed along 2500 kilometers of the East Coast. They estimated how much power offshore wind farms could produce if they had been placed at the same locations as the monitoring stations—which would be the case under current wind-farm configurations. Then they calculated the combined power output of the farms if they were all connected into a single grid... at no time during the 5-year span of the study did the winds die down completely along the hypothetical grid. That means it would have been possible for the hypothetical offshore wind-power grid to generate electricity continuously for all of that time.

[Furthermore] linking the wind farms showed "a tremendous amount of smoothing [of power output which allows you to] make a rapidly changing and unsteady source of power [into]a slowly changing and stable one."

Cristina Archer, a specialist in wind energy meteorology at California State University, Chico says that Kempton's team shows "that an uninterrupted power supply from winds along the most populated and most energy-demanding coastal area in the country, and perhaps in the world, is possible."

[Note added April 7, 2010: The annual State of the Wind Industry report is coming out soon, with initial data suggesting that wind power grew by a whopping 39% last year.]