Publications
CEIC-08-04
"The Spectrum of Power from Utility-Scale Wind Farms and Solar
Photovoltaic Arrays"
Jay Apt and Aimee Curtright
Abstract:
The power spectral density of the output of utility-scale wind farms and
solar photovoltaic (PV) arrays is examined to provide information on the
character of fluctuations in real power output; the power spectrum
constrains the character of fill-in power. Both one second and one hour
samples from several wind farms and ten second and one minute resolution
data from four solar PV arrays are analyzed. The measured output power for
wind follows a Kolmogorov spectrum over more than four orders of
magnitude, from 30 seconds to 2.6 days. That for PV is significantly
flatter; thus fluctuations at short time scales are larger relative to
those at long time scales for PV than for wind. While wind’s capacity
factor varies from 32% at the sites examined to 40% at excellent sites,
the capacity factor for a 4.6 MW PV array in Arizona is determined to be
19% over two years.
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