Risk assessment of wind droughts over India

Wind power growth makes it essential to simulate weather variability and its impacts on the electricity grid. Low-probability, high-impact weather events such as a wind drought are important but difficult to identify based on limited historical datasets. A stochastic weather generator, Imperial College Weather Generator (IMAGE), is employed to identify extreme events through long-period simulations. IMAGE captures mean, spatial correlation and seasonality in wind speed and estimates return periods of extreme wind events over India. Simulations show that when Rajasthan experiences wind drought, southern India continues to have wind, and vice versa. Regional grid-scale wind droughts could be avoided if grids are strongly interconnected across the country.