AWEA blog: How wind energy helps keep the lights on despite variable winds
1. The more wind turbines we install, the less additional variability there is in the amount of power that they produce. As people know from their daily lives, the amount of wind blowing is constantly changing. However, even if one area with a wind farm is not very windy on a given day, another area may be, so their changes in output cancel each other out. The figure below based on data from a study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory shows this phenomenon in action. Variability, represented on the y-axis (measured as the hourly change in output per megawatt of installed wind capacity), decreases as the amount of wind power (measured in megawatts of wind capacity) increases:
