Abstract
Turbulence governs the development and erosion of wind farm wakes, which can deplete the offshore wind resource. Therefore, an accurate understanding of atmospheric turbulence is required to support the rapid growth of offshore wind energy. Using 13 months of lidar observations off the coast of Massachusetts, we find that offshore wind plants at the site will experience very low turbulence, quantified as lidar turbulence intensity, especially in summer, when the wind flows from the open ocean. Moreover, the lowest turbulence regimes are often associated with large wind veer conditions, which can impact the effectiveness of wake steering solutions.
Highlights
Wind energy continues to expand as one of the cleanest energy technologies, with its zero carbon emissions (Boyle, 2004) and zero operational water consumption (Macknick et al, 2012)
Wind speed is generally strong during winter, with average values above culate turbulence kinetic energy (TKE) as
Average values of have a large correlation with monthly average lidar TKE (R = 0.88): when the kinetic energy of turbulence is on average large, large values of are usually needed to dissipate this energy
Summary
Wind energy continues to expand as one of the cleanest energy technologies, with its zero carbon emissions (Boyle, 2004) and zero operational water consumption (Macknick et al, 2012). Current parametrizations of assume a local balance between production and dissipation of turbulence within a grid cell This assumption does not hold when using models at a fine horizontal resolution (Nakanishi & Niino, 2006; Krishnamurthy et al, 2011; Hong & Dudhia, 2012). An accurate model representation of the turbulence dissipation rate would allow for a better layout optimization of offshore wind farms, which would in turn reduce the large costs related to wind farm wakes (Nygaard, 2014) deriving from the uncoordinated development of wind projects (Lundquist et al, 2019). We assess the temporal variability of turbulence dissipation rate retrieved from 13 months of observations from a wind-profiling lidar deployed on an offshore platform.
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