Abstract
High-resolution regional simulations of the downstream effects of wind turbine arrays are presented. The simulations are conducted with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model using two different wind turbine parameterizations for a domain centered on the highest density of current wind turbine deployments in the contiguous US. The simulations use actual wind turbine geolocations and turbine specifications (e.g. power and thrust curves). Resulting analyses indicate that for both WT parameterizations impacts on temperature, specific humidity, precipitation, sensible and latent heat fluxes from current wind turbine deployments are statistically significant only in summer, are of very small magnitude, and are highly localized. It is also shown that use of the relatively recently developed new explicit wake parameterization (EWP) results in faster recovery of full array wakes. This in turn leads to smaller climate impacts and reduced array-array interactions, which at a system-wide scale lead to higher summertime capacity factors (2-6% higher) than those from the more commonly applied ‘Fitch’ parameterization. Our research implies that further expansion of wind turbine deployments can likely be realized without causing substantial downstream impacts on weather and climate, or array-array interactions of a magnitude that would yield substantial decreases in capacity factors.
Highlights
Introduction and MotivationElectricity from wind turbines (WT) currently supplies 6% of the U.S national consumption, but is projected to exceed 20% by 2030
Our research has evolved two key findings: 1. Simulated climate impacts from WT deployments are of very modest magnitude and are maximized in summer due to the lower wind speeds during this season and WT aerodynamics
These results indicate that previous studies based on shorter duration summertime simulations from very high-density WT arrays in the US Central Plains [2,3] may not be representative of the long term climate impacts from WT deployments
Summary
Electricity from wind turbines (WT) currently supplies 6% of the U.S national consumption, but is projected to exceed 20% by 2030. The ‘deep array wake effect’ (i.e. low wind speeds and low electrical power production from WT located near the center of large arrays) and the downstream perturbation of wind speed is generally larger in offshore wind farms [4,5]. This is because the surface is smoother (leading to lower mechanical production of turbulence and ambient turbulence intensity), and the boundary layer depth is generally lower. Use of two parameterized models of the WT rotor aerodynamics means we can sample an important component of the uncertainty space regarding the possible downstream impacts of WT, and enhance the robustness of resulting inferences
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