Electricity Production from Renewables Energies

3.1. Characteristic of the primary resource

3.1.1. Variability

Chapter 1 has shown the extent of the wind power deposit. Wind is present all over the world with very variable characteristics. In addition to this significant geographical variability, we can also notice a significant temporal variability, because the wind speed on a specific site varies with the seasons, months, days. It can also vary a lot within a few seconds. Figure 3.1 gives an example of the wind speed evolution measured every 3 seconds on a site in France along the North Sea coast.

Figure 3.1. Example of the instantaneous evolution of the wind speed

If these fast variations are difficult to predict, the wind speed can be characterized by using an average of the measurements carried out for a given site per month over a year (Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2. Example of the wind speed evolution on the site of Bailey Buoy (United Kingdom) [WIN10])

These measurements help us to characterize the wind power deposit on the considered site. Repeated on a territory, they help to characterize the most favorable sites for wind power collection (Figure 3.3).

A European Wind Atlas has been developed by the Danish research center RISO with support from the European Commission [TRO 89]. Sites exposed to strong winds are more common ...