Abstract
Abstract The intermittency of wind power is a well-known challenge for grid and market integration. Most existing studies focus on large timescales with one-hour resolution. However, as integration into weak grids with energy storage increases and participation in flexibility markets becomes a prospect, minute-scale power fluctuations in the sub-hour range are becoming a concern. These fluctuations mostly arise from turbulence in the ambient wind, and depend on multiple parameters such as farm and turbine size, wind conditions, and turbine wakes. This work aims at bridging a knowledge gap by providing a reference to electrical engineers to quantify power fluctuations for all existing and future offshore wind farms in the North Sea, with the design of energy storage systems as a particular application. It is based on state-of-the-art models for farm-wide turbulence and wakes used in Monte-Carlo simulations for carefully chosen wind conditions. Ramp rates (power gradients) and energy fluctuations over a selection of time periods are then calculated and presented for a set of parametrised wind farms with various layouts and turbine sizes.