Wind Resources – 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 inputs and outputs from wind resource modeling.

Learning objectives

After completing the course, you will be able to:

• List the mechanisms that affect the Annual Energy Production (AEP) of a wind farm.
• Explain the basic driving mechanisms for wind, from global processes down to those linked to the local topography.
• Explain the differences between micro – and mesoscale modelling, and how they can be used together.
• Identify potential errors in the setup of mesoscale and microscale models, through inspection of both inputs/setup and model results.
• Explain the principles, assumptions, and limitations behind a wind atlas (e.g. Global Wind Atlas or regional wind atlases), and use a wind atlas for simple resource estimation.
• Calculate the AEP for simple sites and wind farms, as driven by observations or potentially mesoscale model output.
• Analyse meteorological time series of mean wind and direction with statistical methods.
• Select optimal wind farm layouts based on local conditions.
• Design numerical setup (types of models, parameters, inputs needed) for wind resource assessment campaigns, including observations.