Assessing the world's wind resources

Abstract

A major barrier to the deployment of wind energy in many regions of the world is a lack of reliable and detailed wind resource data. Availability of this data is essential for government and industry to identify wind power generation potential and to act on that knowledge. To overcome this barrier, The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has developed new methods to more accurately assess the wind resource and produce detailed high-resolution (1 km/sup 2/) wind maps for essentially anywhere in the world. These advancements were made possible by a combination of factors, such as the release of global climatic and terrain data sets that were not previously available along with the availability of advanced tools, including geographic information systems (GIS) software and computational modeling techniques. The NREL methodology for creating regional wind resource maps integrates the global terrain and climatic data sets, GIS technology, and analytical and computational modeling techniques. As a result, updated wind assessments can now be produced with much greater accuracy and detail than was previously possible.