Understanding Regional Wind Regime Variation to Maximize Portfolio Benefit

Recent developments in the planning and installation of new long distance transmission lines have created the ability to better diversify one’s renewable energy portfolio by helping utilities and developers combine complementary wind resources to balance regional load profiles. DNV GL has used measured data at operational wind farm sites and state of the science NASA and ECMWF reanalysis datasets to create a historical North American wind index and regional diurnal profiles of wind generation and load. The Pearson coefficient was calculated between the monthly indices for various wind development regions across North America as well as the diurnal profiles to quantify the hourly, seasonal and spatial dependence of a wind resource. Highly correlated and poorly correlated regions are identified to give developers and operators a better understanding of regional seasonal dependencies for risk mitigation. Examples of regional wind generation profiles and their relationships to load profiles are given to illustrate the benefit of a geographically diverse portfolio. Net load is calculated from hourly load and wind profiles to show the importance of having a large system ramping capability to deal with periods when the wind and load profiles are largely out of phase and how a broader diversification of wind resource can help to limit major system ramping events.