Wind conditions and resource assessment

Abstract

The development of wind power as a competitive energy source requires resource assessment of increasing accuracy and detail (including not only the long‐term ‘raw’ wind resource, but also turbulence, shear, and extremes), and in areas of increasing complexity. This in turn requires the use of the most advanced large‐scale meteorological models and data together with a chain of modeling tools linking the large‐scale dynamics via the mesoscales to site‐specific wind conditions. These wind conditions (at a given wind turbine site and height) are a complex function of ‘the weather’ statistics and of influence from features at smaller scales such as hills and mountains, surface roughness conditions, surface thermal properties, and specific nearby obstacles such as ‘other’ wind turbines. This article is categorized under: Bioenergy > Science and Materials Energy and Development > Science and Materials

Using the Twentieth Century Reanalysis to assess climate variability for the European wind industry

“…McVicar et al 2013; Mears 2013 and references therein), and the relatively low resolution of ERAI (and similar data sets) prevents it from being used directly as a proxy for observations at the scale of a wind farm (Kiss et al 2009;Kubik et al 2013). We will instead be using ERAI as an example of the kind of data currently used for providing a climatological basis for wind farm site assessments, the first link in the 'model chain' of dynamical and statistical downscaling for such studies: reanalyses are connected to mesoscale dynamical models, then in turn to microscale models and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) at the scale of a wind farm itself (Petersen and Troen 2012).…”

“…Typically, when a site is considered for wind farm development, developers are often restricted to using statistical techniques to relate observational records from nearby stations to the site in question. Homogeneous data from any single station will usually only span a few years to a decade, but can be supplemented by data from a dedicated meteorological mast positioned on-site for a limited period of time such as 1-3 years (Petersen and Troen 2012;Liléo et al 2013;Carta et al 2013). In the absence of long term data sets of wind speed itself, studies of long term wind variability typically use pressure-based metrics as proxies for the wind (e.g.…”

Evaluation of three mainstream numerical weather prediction models with observations from meteorological mast IJmuiden at the North Sea

“…Since model performance varies with location (orography and land use), atmospheric conditions, and quantity of interest, and the models themselves are continuously improved, evaluation is an ongoing activity. For example, a downscaling product for resource assessment from 2012 was based on a 45‐km grid, whereas the New European Wind Atlas will be based on a 3‐km grid. The growing interest in offshore wind farm development also calls for model evaluation that focuses on offshore conditions, which have received considerably less attention than onshore conditions in the past due to a lack of observations.…”

Offshore winds mapped from satellite remote sensing

“…State‐of‐the‐art atmospheric modeling of the wind conditions and resource assessment is described in Ref . Whether planning wind farms at coastal locations, far offshore, or on land in complex, forested terrain, it is necessary to compare the model results with observations of winds to decrease the uncertainty on the modeled wind statistics.…”