Wind Resources – online course

Wind Resources

During this course, you will be presented with different issues concerning wind resource assessment.

You will learn how to perform wind resource assessments at various scales, and you will be working with applying your acquired understanding and critical thinking to answer open-ended questions based on practical issues of industrial relevance.

Focus will be on solving various issues from theory to practice through tools and knowledge presented in the course.

Your work will be problem-driven, and the teaching emphasises iterative, active learning, which provides you with the competences needed when working with wind resources in the wind industry.

During the course, you will be working with the following:

• Relevant meteorology (motions and force balances from meso- to planetary-scale and important thermodynamic effects).
• Basic atmospheric boundary layer structure and flow phenomena; micro-and meso-scale modeling and practices, including basic parameterizations and numerical aspects.
• Analysis and use of wind statistics from measurements and models (incl. e.g. wind atlas data).
• Scrutiny of both inputs to and outputs from wind resource modeling.

Learning objectives

After completing the course, you will be able to:

• Explain the basic driving mechanisms for wind, from global processess down to those linked to local topography.
• List/outline the mechanisms that affect the Annual Energy Production (AEP) of a wind farm.
• Analyze meteorological time series of mean wind and direction with statistical methods.
• Explain the differences between micro- and mesoscale modeling, and how they can be used together.
• Calculate the AEP for simple sites and wind farms (using observations, or potentially driven by mesoscale model output).
• Identify potential errors in setup of mesoscale and microscale models, through inspection of both inputs/setup and model results.
• Evaluate limitations and consequences of using linearized (common industrial) flow models treating terrain—in practice, considering model output; objectively scrutinize use of complex flow models for a given site.
• Explain the principles, assumptions, and limitations behind a wind atlas (e.g. Global Wind Atlas or country/regional wind atlases), and use a wind atlas for simple estimation of resource potential.
• Evaluate use of long-term correction, considering applicability of reference data.
• Identify and evaluate relevant uncertainty drivers in the resource assessment process.