Challenges in Predicting Power Output from Offshore Wind Farms
Publication: Journal of Energy Engineering
Volume 132, Issue 3
Abstract
Offshore wind energy is developing rapidly in Europe and the trend is towards large wind farms with arrays containing in excess of 80 wind turbines. Considering the capital investment required to develop an offshore wind farm, accurate assessment of the wind resource/power output from the wind farm is a necessity. Accurately predicting the power output requires an estimate of the wind resource over the lifetime of the wind farm at the turbine hub height. The lack of climatologically representative in situ measurements at typical turbine hub heights and potential nonstationarities in flow regimes introduce uncertainties in the resource assessment which are described herein along with methods that may be used to reduce or quantify these uncertainties.
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Acknowledgments
Financial support for this research was provided by the “Impacts of Climate Change on Renewable Energy Sources and their Role in the Energy System: 2003–2006” project funded by Nordic Energy Research (under the Nordic Council of Ministers), the “Stormaalepark” project funded by the Danish PSO-F&U program, Grant No. (UNSPECIFIED4108) and the Anemos Project No. (UNSPECIFIEDENK5-CT-2002-00665) funded by the European Commission under the 5th (EC) RTD Framework Programme (1998–2002) within the thematic program “Energy, Environment, and Sustainable Development.” The computational component of the research was made possible by a grant from the United States NSF to IU to establish the AVIDD computing cluster.NSF The NCEP/NCAR reanalysis products are from: ⟨http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cdc/reanalysis⟩. The Danish wind energy index is available from ⟨http://www.emd.dk⟩. The HadCM3 output was obtained from the Climate Impacts LINK Project (DERFA contract No. UNSPECIFIEDEPG 1/1/124) on behalf of the Hadley Centre. Data collection at the Danish sites was financed by SEAS and Energi E2.
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Published In
Journal of Energy Engineering
Volume 132 • Issue 3 • December 2006
Pages: 91 - 103
Copyright
© 2006 ASCE.
History
Received: Sep 7, 2005
Accepted: Sep 7, 2005
Published online: Dec 1, 2006
Published in print: Dec 2006
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