The new Italian Wind Atlas - Atlante EOLico ItaliANo (AEOLIAN)

Abstract

Recent developments in terms of meteorological models and wind generation technologies call for an improved representation of the spatiotemporal variability of the wind conditions, in order to efficiently support strategic planning at the national scale.To do so, we have developed the new Italian Wind Atlas – Atlante EOLico ItaliANo (AEOLIAN), building upon its previous release at the beginning of the century, with the main goal of supporting the operators in planning the future wind generation, in accordance with the ambitious targets set for 2030 by the EU Green Deal (over 20 GW of installed onshore wind power, plus about 3 GW offshore).The new database is the results of a collaboration effort between Ricerca sul Sistema Energetico (RSE) SpA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which jointly developed a novel approach combining Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) based numerical weather modeling with the Analog Ensemble (AnEn) statistical technique.To create the atlas, model simulations have been initially carried out at hourly time-step over the 1990-2019 period with a horizontal resolution of 4 km, nesting a 1.33 km inner grid only for the 2015-2019 period. AnEn is then employed to extend in the past the 5 high-resolution years, creating a 30-year dataset which embeds the whole country, including the marine areas.Compared to similar products currently available, the new Atlas provides higher horizontal resolution and enhanced accuracy, thanks to the assimilation of the observational wind data of the Italian regional weather network in the simulations.Preliminary results are shown here by comparing AEOLIAN with other atlases recently developed at international level such as the New European Wind Atlas (NEWA), and by highlighting the differences with respect to the original Italian Wind Atlas. Some derived parameters of particular interest for the operators are also featured and shown, such as wind power density.