specific to any single generation facility; rather it is measured on a system-wide basis. In addition, unlike other sources of generation that can go offline in 1/60th of a second, wind’s output tends to decrease gradually over a matter of hours, giving system operators more time to respond to changes.
In fact, as more wind turbines are installed, the aggregate variability of their
output decreases. This is because larger wind plants are built by installing more, rather t han larger, wind generators. Those individual machines must be spaced out, resulting in a decrease in variability speed because of the time it takes for a “wind event” to cross the turbine field. Aggregating several wind plants further reduces wind variability because of the greater distances between individual
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wind plants. The United States’ large size and diverse wind resource makes it likely that shortfalls in wind output in one region are compensated for by higher output in other regions. In addition, wind forecasting tools that warn system operators of pending major wind output variations are becoming widely used and better integrated into system operations.
Jon Brekke, vice president of Member Services for Great River Energy, a utility that operates in Minnesota and Wisconsin, said, “Wind energy is a valuable part of our diverse and growing energy portfolio. Geographic diversity of wind energy helps even out the variability of wind energy in the regional market.” In addition, wind farms are typically made up of many individual turbines that reduce the impact of outages. For instance, there are 67 1.5-MW turbines at Great River Energy’s Trimont Wind Farm, so if one is down for maintenance “only 1. 5 percent of the total wind farm’s generating capacity is lost,” Brekke said.
It can be said that wind power is as reliable as any other form of electric generation—but that the variable nature of its output does require some special considerations.
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The key to integrating wind power in electricity grids is to recognize that there are already a number of sources of variability on the system today and while wind power adds other sources of variability, the challenges to integrate it are incremental. This is not unlike the challenges system operators had to adjust to in the 1960s and 1970s to integrate large, baseload nuclear power stations that had previously not been part of the operating scheme. Wind power is best integrated into large regional markets for electricity—a small utility that balances its own system in a real-time manner in a small geographic footprint is likely to face challenges in integrating a large amount of wind power (see “Austin’s Windy Limits,” page 68). But for a system that is robust, interconnected to other control areas and has a good mix of resources, wind power can be integrated readily and at low cost. As previously noted, this is already happening in several European countries and experience is being gained in a number of regions in the United States.
Recent work by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) points out that several
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