AEOLIAN, the new Italian Wind Atlas for local energy planning support

Abstract

The decarbonization objectives set by the EU Green Deal to increase the renewable generation heavily rely on the contribution of wind energy, both onshore, through the installation of new plants and repowering of existing plants, and offshore. The issuance of the new "Fit for 55" package of measures will result in an increase in the objectives already identified for 2030 for Italy, which in all probability will be set at over 21 GW of installed capacity for onshore wind (i.e., doubling the currently operating power) and at least 3 GW for offshore wind. An informed energy planning of the territory is therefore paramount to efficiently maximize renewable penetration. In these regards, the development of informatic tools aimed at disentangling both resource availability and generation potential can effectively play a key role in supporting optimal technology displacement through space. RSE has worked on these themes since the end of the 1990s, when the first version of the Italian Wind Atlas (ATLAEOLICO) WebGIS was released, providing a support tool for adequate energy planning of the territory. Throughout the years, the Wind Atlas has represented a reference for various stakeholders (wind plants developers, authorities responsible for spatial planning and companies involved in the electricity grid development) who recognized its great utility in quickly identifying the most suitable Italian areas for wind energy exploitation in terms of long-term annual average wind speed and full load hours.  With the purpose that this platform keeps providing tangible support for energy planning, we have worked on both renewing the anemological database and the WebGIS structure, which is the focus of this work.  The new Italian Wind Atlas AEOLIAN provides for a new anemological database consisting in 30 years (1990-2019) of hourly wind data at 1.4 km horizontal resolution (WGS84 UTM32) covering the whole Italian territory and marine areas. Wind trajectories are estimated through the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) meteorological model combined with a statistical post-processing based on Analog Ensemble (AnEn). The renewed AEOLIAN WebGIS, developed through the open access framework TerriaJS, integrates standard functions for visualizing and querying data, data download functions and advanced tools to support local energy planning. It shows the spatial distribution of onshore and offshore wind speed [m/s] and full load hours [MWh/MW]. Each variable is computed as the 30 years annual average at the heights of 50, 75, 100, 125 e 150 m. a.s.l. Within AEOLIAN, users can download both variable maps and historical series of wind speed for more accurate evaluations. Besides maps, AEOLIAN also includes a tool for the technical and economical evaluation of a hypothetical wind farm at a local scale. This tool allows assessing the energy performances in terms of the net annual energy production and the average cost of the energy produced, considering local distribution of the wind resource, energy performances of the wind farm and investments and management costs.