Deep analysis of wind variability and smoothing effect in Moroccan wind farms

Abstract

The Moroccan energy strategy has set new targets of reaching 52% of installed renewable energy capacity by 2030, through the development of renewable energy, including solar and wind energy. The massive use of renewables leads the country to deal with its intermittency and improve its integration in the grid. The offset between wind farms generation in different regions is essential for quantifying the reduction of intermittency when we chose wind farms sites. This offset, the smoothing effect, is analyzed deeply in this article to evaluate different compensation zones. Six wind farms with wind power variability and their potential impact on the capacity reserve are presented. The site’s power was generated from reel hourly data during 12 months. Results show that energy fluctuation depends on typical wind regimes and the capacity of farms. North wind farms (280 MW) produce 50% of the maximum during 43% of time and south wind farms produce it only 17% of time. The first farm’s power consistently spreads more than south farms, but also more smoothed. The average intermittency reduced as farm capacity increased due to the turbine smoothing effect and the reserve requirements increased on average. The behavior of south wind farms is more correlated, then the backup needed will be less.