Intermittency of Aggregated Wind Power Productions*

Wind turbines convert the kinetic energy of wind into electric power. As a consequence, the produced power displays the same statistics as atmospheric turbulence. In particular, power fluctuations exhibit Kolmogorov scaling, multifractal statistics, and transition from antipersistent to persistent scaling when averaged over several farms.

We treat a specific effect related to wind power processing: farm aggregated wind power production displays excess persistency and intermittency. By analyzing the power production of a farm of 80 turbines, we show that such breakdown of the Central Limit Theorem is directly ascribed to the space-time structure of atmospheric turbulence. More specifically, our work reveals (i) the universal cross-correlations structure between turbines and (ii) the peculiar organization of extreme fluctuation bursts leading to excess intermittency. Ultimately, we expect our analysis to provide supplementary guidelines for the efficient design and power processing of wind farms.