A workflow for including atmospheric stability effects in wind resource and yield assessment and its evaluation against wind measurements and SCADA

Abstract

Atmospheric stability conditions are known to impact the wind resource and yield assessments. However, they are too barely or not correctly taken into account in the industry due to several reasons such as limitations of commercial software or the relative inertia in updating industrial processes. This paper proposes a simplistic approach to improve wind resource and yield assessment certainty while keeping very similar software and industry processes. Two test cases are considered. First, the wind speed estimates made using a CFD software (Meteodyn 5.3) for different stability classes are compared to measurements obtained on a site with four met masts. Second, the wake losses obtained with a commercial yield assessment solver (WindPRO 3.5) considering different wake decay constant definitions are compared to SCADA data. In both cases, it appears that dividing the timeseries in “stability classes” and using corresponding stability parameters in the CFD and in the wake model parameters enable a reduction of the uncertainty. In the case of the energy estimation compared to SCADA, an improvement of 1.25% is obtained compared to the conventional approach.