Wind resource assessment

High resolution mapping of wind power resource potential has traditionally been carried out at the country level by government or research agencies, in part due to the complexity of the process and the intensive computing requirements involved.

[5] However, mapping can help speed up the process of site identification and the existence of high quality, ground-based data can shorten the amount of time that on-site measurements need to be collected.

Meteorological towers equipped with anemometers, wind vanes, and sometimes temperature, pressure, and relative humidity sensors are installed.

Data from these towers must be recorded for at least one year to calculate an annually representative wind speed frequency distribution.

Models with such a small domain are not capable of capturing meso-scale atmospheric phenomena that often drive wind patterns.

Meteodyn WT and WindStation are similar applications that use computational fluid dynamics (CFD) calculations instead, which are potentially more accurate, particularly for complex terrains.

This information is then used to design a wind farm that maximizes energy production while taking restrictions and construction issues into account.

There are several wind farm modeling software applications available, including ZephyCFD, Meteodyn WT, Openwind, Windfarmer, WindPRO, WindSim, and WAsP.

This type of wind projects is mostly driven by land owners with high energetic requirements such as farmers and industrial site managers.

A particular requirement from a wind modelling point of view is the inclusion of all local features such as trees, hedges and buildings as turbine hub-heights range from as little as 10m to 50m.