Abstract
Offshore wind resource assessments for the conterminous U.S. and Hawai’i have been developed before, but Alaska’s offshore wind resource has never been rigorously assessed. Alaska, with its vast coastline, presents ample potential territory in which to build offshore wind farms, but significant challenges have thus far limited Alaska’s deployment of utility-scale wind energy capacity to a modest 62 MW (or approximately 2.7% of the state’s electric generation) as of this writing, all in land-based wind farms. This study provides an assessment of Alaska’s offshore wind resource, the first such assessment for Alaska, using a 14-year, high-resolution simulation from a numerical weather prediction and regional climate model. This is the longest-known high-resolution model data set to be used in a wind resource assessment. Widespread areas with relatively shallow ocean depth and high long-term average 100-m wind speeds and estimated net capacity factors over 50% were found, including a small area near Alaska’s population centers and the largest transmission grid that, if even partially developed, could provide the bulk of the state’s energy needs. The regional climate simulations were validated against available radiosonde and surface wind observations to provide the confidence of the model-based assessment. The model-simulated wind speed was found to be skillful and with near-zero average bias (−0.4–0.2 m s−1) when averaged over the domain. Small sample sizes made regional validation noisy, however.
Highlights
Wind power is a steadily growing source of energy generation in the United States and around the world
This study focuses on a regional wind resource assessment for the Alaska region, namely of the hub height wind speed, validated against available observations
Though our primary focus is on validating the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) data set for offshore wind resource assessment, it is still valuable to include validation results for the WRF simulations over land, as an indication of the overall quality of the WRF simulations
Summary
Wind power is a steadily growing source of energy generation in the United States and around the world. In 2017, wind turbines provided 515 GW, or about 4%, of generating capacity globally, with 18 GW of that being offshore wind [1]. By the end of 2016, wind turbines provided 82.1 GW of generating capacity in the United States, or 8% of the nationwide total, surpassing the generating capacity of hydroelectric power for the first time ever [2,3]. A recent report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimated the nationwide total technical offshore wind energy potential capacity to be 2057 GW [5], revealing the tremendous and essentially untapped potential for new development to continue increasing wind power capacity in the U.S That study and total estimate did not include Alaska, for technical reasons.
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