PDF models and synthetic model for the wind speed fluctuations based on the resolution of Langevin equation

Wind energy production is very sensitive to turbulent wind speed. Thus rapid variation of wind speed due to changes in the local meteorological conditions can lead to electrical power variations of the order of the nominal power output, in particular when wind power variations on very short time scales, range at few seconds to 1 h, are considered. In small grid as they exist on islands (Guadeloupean Archipelago: French West Indies) such fluctuations can cause instabilities in case of intermediate power shortages. The developed analysis in [14] reveals three main classes of time series for the wind speed fluctuations. In this work, Probability Density Functions (PDFs) are proposed to fit the wind speed fluctuations distributions in each class. After, to simulate wind speed fluctuations sequences, we use a stochastic differential equation, the Langevin equation considering Gaussian turbulence PDF (class I), Gram-Charlier PDF (class II) and a mixture of gaussian PDF (class III). The statistical and dynamical properties of simulated wind sequences are close to those of measured wind sequences, for each class. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.