Abstract
Renewable energy sources are becoming increasingly integrated into the electricity-generation sector, being eco-friendly solutions, decreasing global warming, and improving the energy transition process. Among the different renewables, wind energy is considered a mature, clean, renewable, and inexhaustible technology as well, becoming one of the main resources in a sustainable framework. Aiming to evaluate the wind resource, scientific contributions have mostly presented a common basis: historical data campaigns of the wind resource mainly considering wind speed—including the module, direction, standard deviation, etc. However, online wind-atlas databases are becoming tools widely used for both wind-resource assessment and optimal wind-power locations. Under this framework, this study analyzed and compared such online wind data sources and their integration with GIS tools for optimal wind-resource-assessment purposes. The proposed methodology identified the corresponding wind-atlas databases directly on their websites and indirectly through the wind data used in relevant contributions about the optimal location of wind sites. Our contribution to the scientific community is thus the review and comparison of these atlas databases for reducing the barrier to access wind data—including GIS-tool-integration analysis. The limitations raised by civil societies, particularly regarding environmental and bird concerns, were not included in this study. Nevertheless, the authors are aware of these concerns and limitations. A Spanish case study was also included in this work, comparing both estimated and collected wind-atlas databases in terms of wind-resource assessment.
Highlights
Sustainable development is a major goal of worldwide policy [1]
This study aimed to describe and compare such wind atlases available online, discussing their main indicators—wind data, data collection height, sample time, etc
Renewable energy sources are increasingly integrated into the energy sector
Summary
A sustainable world addresses renewable-energy-source integration into different sectors, leaving behind fossil-fuel energy sources, such as oil [2], coal [3], and gasoline [4], and decreasing large emissions [5,6]. Wind energy is considered one of the strongest and most profitable resources [7,8,9]. The evolution of the global wind sector is upward, in the new MW added to the total capacity as electrical energy generated from wind-power plants. The global accumulated wind capacity in 2020, including both technologies (on- and offshore), accounts for 743 GW—a 14% growth over the previous year. Previous wind-energy-evolution data analysis can be found in [11]
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