Realized Power Curves and the Curtailment Tax A Public-Data Framework for State-Resolved Wind-Plant Siting in a Congested Grid

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Abstract
A wind project is financed against a nameplate power curve, but delivers only the energy a congested grid lets it inject. We build realized power curves — what a plant achieves at its connection point — for the 1,051 curtailment-exposed wind plants of the Brazilian system, resolved across all nine curtailed-wind states, from a public pipeline of system-operatorconstrained-off records and the national generation registry. A capacityfactor decomposition separates reference, available and delivered yield, isolating the curtailment tax: the physical share of available energy the grid withholds. Fleet delivered capacity factor is 38.5% against an available 49.7% — an 11.3-point tax, 22.6% of available energy, about twice the residual gap to a reference turbine. An audit shows the operator’s constrained-off field is a model counterfactual, bounding the true loss between 18.2% and 22.6%. Exposure is locational, and its wind-speed signature rather than the annual rate separates two siting regimes: it rises steeply along one corridor carrying 80.5% of national forgone energy, and is flat to falling elsewhere, including a South whose 16.7% rate sits inside the Northeast’s own range. A plant-sited battery recovers at most about a third of it, with network headroom rather than battery size binding.

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