Contrasting Electricity Demand with Wind Power Supply: Case Study in Hungary

Péter Kiss, László Varga and Imre M. Jánosi
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Péter Kiss: Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Loránd Eötvös University, Pázmány P. s. 1/A, H-1117 Budapest, Hungary
László Varga: E.ON Hungária Ltd., Roosevelt tér 7-8, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary
Imre M. Jánosi: Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Loránd Eötvös University, Pázmány P. s. 1/A, H-1117 Budapest, Hungary

Energies, 2009, vol. 2, issue 4, 1-12

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.

Keywords: wind power; intermittency; electricity consumption pattern (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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