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Investigating the impacts of spatial-temporal variation features of air density on assessing wind power generation and its fluctuation in China

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Abstract

Air density plays an important role in assessing wind resource. Air density significantly fluctuates both spatially and temporally. But literature typically used standard air density or local annual average air density to assess wind resource. The present study investigates the estimation errors of the potential and fluctuation of wind resource caused by neglecting the spatial-temporal variation features of air density in China. The air density at 100 m height is accurately calculated by using air temperature, pressure, and humidity. The spatial-temporal variation features of air density are firstly analyzed. Then the wind power generation is modeled based on a 1.5 MW wind turbine model by using the actual air density, standard air density ρst, and local annual average air density ρsite, respectively. Using ρst overestimates the annual wind energy production (AEP) in 93.6% of the study area. Humidity significantly affects AEP in central and southern China areas. In more than 75% of the study area, the winter to summer differences in AEP are underestimated, but the intra-day peak-valley differences and fluctuation rate of wind power are overestimated. Using ρsite significantly reduces the estimation error in AEP. But AEP is still overestimated (0–8.6%) in summer and underestimated (0–11.2%) in winter. Except for southwest China, it is hard to reduce the estimation errors of winter to summer differences in AEP by using ρsite. Using ρsite distinctly reduces the estimation errors of intra-day peak-valley differences and fluctuation rate of wind power, but these estimation errors cannot be ignored as well. The impacts of air density on assessing wind resource are almost independent of the wind turbine types.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Control and Computer Engineering, North China Electric Power University, Beijing, 102206, China

    GuoRui Ren, Wei Wang & Feng Hong

  2. School of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150001, China

    Jie Wan

  3. Xi’an Thermal Power Research Institute Co., Ltd., Xi’an, 710054, China

    Ke Yang

  4. School of Energy Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, 150001, China

    DaRen Yu

Authors
  1. GuoRui Ren
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  2. Wei Wang
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  3. Jie Wan
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  4. Feng Hong
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  5. Ke Yang
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  6. DaRen Yu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to GuoRui Ren.

Additional information

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 52107091), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 2022MS017), and the Science and Technology Project of CHINA HUANENG (Offshore wind power and smart energy system, Grant No. HNKJ20-H88).

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The supporting information is available online at https://tech.scichina.com and https://link.springer.com. The supporting materials are published as submitted, without typesetting or editing. The responsibility for scientific accuracy and content remains entirely with the authors.

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11431_2022_2248_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

Investigating the impacts of spatial-temporal variation features of air density on assessing wind power generation and its fluctuation in China

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Ren, G., Wang, W., Wan, J. et al. Investigating the impacts of spatial-temporal variation features of air density on assessing wind power generation and its fluctuation in China. Sci. China Technol. Sci. 66, 1797–1814 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-022-2248-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-022-2248-4

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