Contrasting electricity demand with wind power supply: Case study in Hungary

Abstract

We compare the demand of a large electricity consumer with supply given by wind farms installed at two distant geographic locations. Obviously such situation is rather unrealistic, however our main goal is a quantitative characterization of the intermittency of wind electricity. The consumption pattern consists of marked daily and weekly cycles interrupted by periods of holidays. In contrast, wind electricity production has neither short-time nor seasonal periodicities. We show that wind power integration over a restricted area cannot provide a stable baseload supply, independently of the excess capacity. Further essential result is that the statistics are almost identical for a weekly periodic pattern of consumption and a constant load of the same average value. The length of both adequate supply and shortfall intervals exhibits a scale-free (power-law) frequency distribution, possible consequences are shortly discussed. © 2009 by the authors; licensee Molecular Diversity Preservation International, Basel, Switzerland.