Wind Energy Resource Evaluation

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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. However, in 2015 the Technical University of Denmark, under framework of the Clean Energy Ministerial, launched the Global Wind Atlas (version 1.0) to provide freely available data on wind resource potential globally. The Global Wind Atlas was relaunched in November 2017 (version 2.0) in partnership with the World Bank, with wind resource maps now available for all countries at 250m resolution.

Another similar international example is the European Wind Atlas, which is in the process of being updated under the New European Wind Atlas project funded by the European Union.

Examples of country wind resource maps include the Canadian Wind Atlas, the Wind Resource Atlas of the United States, and a series of wind maps published by the World Bank under an initiative launched by ESMAP in 2013 focused on developing countries.^[1] This followed a previous initiative of the United Nations Environment Program, the Solar and Wind Energy Resource Assessment (SWERA) project, which was launched in 2002 with funding from the Global Environment Facility. However, these country wind resource maps have been largely superseded by the Global Wind Atlas in terms of data quality, methodology, and output resolution.

The above global and country mapping outputs, and many others, are also available via the Global Atlas for Renewable Energy ^[2] developed by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), which brings together publicly available GIS data on wind and other renewable energy resources effort.

Wind prospecting can begin with the use of such maps, but the lack of accuracy and fine detail make them useful only for preliminary selection of sites for collecting wind speed data.^[3] With increasing numbers of ground-based measurements from specially installed anemometer stations, as well as operating data from commissioned wind farms, the accuracy of wind resource maps in many countries has improved over time, although coverage in most developing countries is still patchy. In addition to the publicly available sources listed above, maps are available as commercial products through specialist consultancies, or users of GIS software can make their own using publicly available GIS data such as the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory's High Resolution Wind Data Set.^[4]

Although the accuracy has improved, it is unlikely that wind resource maps, whether public or commercial, will eliminate the need for on-site measurements for utility-scale wind generation projects.^[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.

In addition to 'static' wind resource atlases which average estimates of wind speed and power density across multiple years, tools such as Renewables.ninja provide time-varying simulations of wind speed and power output from different wind turbine models at an hourly resolution.^[6]