Correlation between wind power generation in the European countries

The correlations between wind power generation in different countries are important for quantifying the reductions in variability when electrically interconnecting the countries. Hourly, country-wise time series of wind power output were generated for all European countries using MERRA reanalysis data. By comparing the model output with actual measurements, it is shown that this approach is appropriate for studying correlations. In order to deepen the analysis, correlation coefficients were not only computed for these time series, but also for the one hour step changes and for band-pass filtered data. The general pattern is that correlations reduce with separation distance in an exponential fashion and are highest for the long-term components (T > 4 months) and lowest for step changes and short-term components (T < 2 days). Interesting deviations from this pattern however exist. When comparing to earlier results for individual farms, the exponential decay is slower, in particular for step changes.