Abstract
Australia’s wind resource is considered to be very good, and the utilization of this renewable energy resource is increasing rapidly: wind power installed capacity increased by 35% from 2006 to 2011 and is predicted to account for over 12% of Australia’s electricity generation in 2030. Due to this growth in the utilization of the wind resource and the increasing importance of wind power in Australia’s energy mix, this study sets out to analyze and interpret the nature of Australia’s wind resources using robust metrics of the abundance, variability and intermittency of wind power density, and analyzes the variation of these characteristics with current and potential wind turbine hub heights. We also assess the extent to which wind intermittency, on hourly or greater timescales, can potentially be mitigated by the aggregation of geographically dispersed wind farms, and in so doing, lessen the severe impact on wind power economic viability of long lulls in wind and power generated. Our results suggest that over much of Australia, areas that have high wind intermittency coincide with large expanses in which the aggregation of turbine output does not mitigate variability. These areas are also geographically remote, some are disconnected from the east coast’s electricity grid and large population centers, which are factors that could decrease the potential economic viability of wind farms in these locations. However, on the eastern seaboard, even though the wind resource is weaker, it is less variable, much closer to large population centers, and there exists more potential to mitigate it’s intermittency through aggregation. This study forms a necessary precursor to the analysis of the impact of large-scale circulations and oscillations on the wind resource at the mesoscale.
Highlights
The general climatology of the winds in Australia has been documented on a national basis [1,2,3] and at the state level [4,5,6,7], using a variety of methodologies [8]
Davy and Coppin (2003) [40] found that the variability in the total wind power output in south east Australia can be reduced to some extent by wider distribution of numerous wind farms, but remains substantial, their analysis suggests some degree of anticoincidence of southeastern Australia’s wind resource
Our study suggests that many areas with the strongest widespread wind resource, in terms of both mean and median wind power density (WPD) (SW Western Australia, southern South Australia and Tasmania, and SW Victoria) score relatively highly on measures of variability (IQR, robust coefficient of variation (RCoV)) and exhibit moderate levels of intermittency, in terms of reliability and persistence
Summary
The general climatology of the winds in Australia has been documented on a national basis [1,2,3] and at the state level [4,5,6,7], using a variety of methodologies [8]. Most previous published studies use the mean to characterize the central tendency of the wind resource, histograms of the wind resource measured using wind power density are characteristically skewed with longtailed distributions [9] (Figure S1). Wind power studies based only on the total mean WPD do not give a representative picture of the central tendency of the wind power potential and omit valuable information in terms of wind intermittency, variability and the temporal distribution of power generation [10], which would affect estimates of power production and required backup [11].
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