Development of Regional Wind Resource and Wind Plant Output Datasets: Final Subcontract Report

This is the Final Report for the project “Development of Regional Wind Resource and Wind Plant Output Datasets“(NREL subcontract number: AAM-8-77556-01 under prime contract number: DE-AC36-99GO10337). The report covers the period of the contract from October 15, 2007 through March 15, 2009. The final delivered outcomes of this project include: • This report detailing the work produced. • 30 validation reports for the purpose of tuning the mesoscale models. • The numerical weather prediction (NWP) simulations for 2004-2006 in NetCDF format with a spatial resolution of one arc-minute and a temporal resolution of ten minutes. • 30,544 original sites and 1499 additional that were extracted into time series data files for 2004-2006. These sites had the following information provided: o Wind speed at 100 meters (m) o Rated power output at 100 m o SCORE-lite o Mesoscale forecasts at 100 m power output at 100 m o “Perfect” forecasts o “Two-hourly” persistence forecasts o By-hour monthly climatology forecasts • Solar forecasts from mesoscale models for a regular grid of 8736 points • 28 validation reports for the final data set on publicly available data • 2 validation reports on confidentially sourced data • SCORE-lite validation report • Web-based graphical file server • Extension to the contract where each of the 32,043 sites had wind speed and wind direction pulled from the model runs at 10 m, 20 m, 50 m, 100 m, and 200 m. A paper was written based on this collaboration between the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and 3TIER. The paper was presented at the 7th International Workshop on Large Scale Integration of Wind Power and on Transmission Networks for Offshore Wind Farms, Madrid, May 2008. It was subsequently invited for publication in the Wind Engineering Journal, Volume 32, Number 4, 2008