ABSTRACT
Researchers have been estimating the long-term variability of wind power since the 1940s, when large-scale wind power was fi rst considered in detail. Thomas (1945), an early proponent of large-scale wind power, examined 25 years of wind speed data from seven weather stations around the United States and estimated that “the annual average velocity for any one year seldom drops more than 10 or 15 percent below the long-term average velocity” (p. 6). Around the same time, Golding and Stodhart (1949) analyzed wind speed records from weather stations in the UK and found that the annual average wind speed in a given year lies “between 65% and 130% of the long-term average” (p. 14). Later, when the energy crises of the 1970s renewed interest in wind power, Justus and colleagues (1979) used monthly average wind speeds from 40 sites around the United States to estimate variability and spatial correlation of monthly and annual wind speeds. Klink (1999) calculated the interannual variability of wind speed from historical weather data for 216 stations in the United States for the period 1961 through 1990. Wan (2012) did a similar analysis with 6 to 10 years of wind power data from four U.S. wind plants. Sinden (2007) analyzed wind speeds from weather stations around the UK to estimate the benefi ts of spatial diversity for wind power. Recently, Katzenstein and colleagues (2010) estimated the interannual variability of aggregate wind energy from 16 weather stations for 1973 through 2008.
