Long-Term Wind Resource Mapping of Korean West-South Offshore for the 2.5 GW Offshore Wind Power Project

Abstract

A long-term wind resource map was made to provide the key design data for the 2.5 GW Korean West-South Offshore Wind Project, and its reliability was validated. A one-way dynamic downscaling of the MERRA reanalysis meteorological data of the Yeongwang-Gochang offshore was carried out using WindSim, a Computational Fluid Dynamics based wind resource mapping software, to establish a 33-year time series wind resource map of 100 m x 100 m spatial resolution and 1-hour interval temporal resolution from 1979 to 2012. The simulated wind resource map was validated by comparison with wind measurement data from the HeMOSU offshore meteorological tower, the Wangdeungdo Island meteorological tower, and the Gochang transmission tower on the nearby coastline, and the uncertainty due to long-term variability was analyzed. The long-term variability of the wind power was investigated in inter-annual, monthly, and daily units while the short-term variability was examined as the pattern of the coefficient of variation in hourly units. The results showed that the inter-annual variability had a maximum wind index variance of 22.3% while the short-term variability, i.e., the annual standard deviation of the hourly average wind power, was <TEX>$0.041{\pm}0.001$</TEX>, indicating steady variability.