A simple methodology to detect and quantify wind power ramps

Knowledge about the expected duration and intensity of wind power ramps is important when planning the integration of wind power production into an electricity network. The detection and classification of wind power ramps is not straightforward due to the large range of events that is observed and the stochastic nature of the wind. The development of an algorithm that can detect and classify wind power ramps is thus of some benefit to the wind energy community. In this study, we describe a relatively simple methodology using a wavelet transform to discriminate ramp events. We illustrate the utility of the methodology by studying distributions of ramp rates and their duration using 2 years of data from the Belgian offshore cluster. This brief study showed that there was a strong correlation between ramp rate and ramp duration, that a majority of ramp events were less than 15 h with a median duration of around 8 h, and that ramps with a duration of more than a day were rare. Also, we show how the methodology can be applied to a time series where installed capacity changes over time using Swedish onshore wind farm data. Finally, the performance of the methodology is compared with another ramp detection method and their sensitivities to parameter choice are contrasted.