Understanding the Long-Term Wind Resource
Understanding the long-term wind resource is critical to developing and operating wind power plants. A growing body of work has shown the need for long-term reference wind data covering a span of 30 years or more. Due to natural climatic variability on the decadal scale, shorter time spans may provide misleading results when characterizing long-term mean wind speeds and understanding wind variability at a site.
To understand the value of wind resource assessment over long time scales, WindLogics conducts extensive research to compare different sources of long-term data, studying their correlation with multi-year tall tower data and analyzing the errors associated with wind resource estimates based on different sources and correlation techniques. A theme that has emerged from this work is that regardless of the type of reference dataset or the methods used to extend the data to reflect long-term trends at the site, it is the predictive ability of the data and methods used that matters most. In other words, statistics that characterize the correlation between the site and reference datasets are not sufficient for evaluating the relationship between the site and reference datasets – the underlying distributions (time-series, histograms, wind roses, etc.) must be examined as well.
Download PDFs:
The Long-Term Wind Resource Part 1 - Data Sources for Predicting Wind Plant Performance
The Long-Term Wind Resource Part 2 - Comparing Data Sources and Techniques for Predicting the Performance of Wind Plants