Investigation on the spatiotemporal complementarity of wind energy resources in China

Abstract

Wind power resources are abundant in China, especially in northern China and eastern coastal areas of China. Nevertheless, wind energy has intermittent and unstable characteristics, which leads to random power output and limits the large-scale utilization of wind energy resources. It has been shown that geographically dispersed wind plants have obvious spatiotemporal offsetting effect. Power output from each individual site exhibits the power ups and downs. However, when we simulate power lines connecting sites over a certain region, the output from them changes slowly and rarely reaches either very low or full power. Hence using the spatiotemporal complementarity of wind resources effectively is highly beneficial to the smoothing of power supply. This paper investigates the spatiotemporal complementarity of wind resources in China based on the relevant data of wind energy resources, which are offered by China Meteorological Administration (CMA).