Behavior of the aggregate wind resource in the ISO regions in the United States

• Aggregated wind power in the ISO regions in the US has been studied.
• Aggregation mitigates intermittency partially.
• The intermittency in power generation is synchronized spatially in each region.
• The benefits of aggregation saturates asymptotically with the number of generating units.
• The benefits of aggregation falls with the correlation between the generating units.

The collective behavior of wind farms in seven Independent System Operator (ISO) areas has been studied. The generation duration curves for each ISO show that there is no aggregated power for some fraction of time. Aggregation of wind turbines mitigates intermittency to some extent, but in each ISO there is considerable fraction of time when there is less than 5% capacity. The hourly wind power time series show benefit of aggregation but the high and low wind events are lumped in time, thus indicating that intermittency is synchronized in each region. The timeseries show that there are instances when there is no wind power in most ISOs because of large-scale high pressure systems. An analytical consideration of the collective behavior of aggregated wind turbines shows that the benefit of aggregation saturates beyond a certain number of generating units asymptotically. Also, the benefit of aggregation falls rapidly with temporal correlation between the generating units.