The Availability and Variability of the European Wind Resource

The purpose of this paper is to show the differences in the availability and variability between the wind at individual sites and the wind taken over a European scale. One of the questions this paper will try to answer: ‘is there a benefit from having wind farms covering a large area’, has been asked a number of times in the discussion about the usefulness of large-scale integration of wind energy. A European wind is made up of normalized stations scattered all over Europe scaled with a factor determined from the European Wind Atlas[4].