Methodology for Assessing Meteorological Observation Data to Account for Wind Potential in The Design of a Wind Power Plant

Abstract

The development of clean renewable energy sources is a strategic task to ensure the balance of energy supply to territories. When implementing a policy of reducing dependence on or abandoning fossil fuels, the use of renewable energy sources is an obvious competitive solution. And for territories remote from power supply networks, the development of renewable energy sources is generally the only alternative. Wind energy is increasingly being used to generate electricity. In this sense, accurate accounting of the influence of wind potential on the energy balance is the basis of energy-saving architecture. From a thermodynamic point of view, wind is a high-quality source of energy. Its high efficiency makes it possible in principle to convert into other types of energy. However, the wind energy flow is unstable – the performance of wind power plants is due to their extremely high sensitivity to the conditions of their location. In this situation, the reliability of the initial data on wind energy resources is a criterion of paramount importance. Therefore, the development of a methodology for evaluating data from long-term meteorological observations of wind speed and direction is of important empirical importance. To design a wind power plant, it is not enough to enter ready–made data on the value of specific power and specific wind energy in the territory into economic calculations - the data deviation is too large. It is necessary to calculate the technical potential of the wind power plant for each prospective location option. Both the approach to accounting for wind potential and the approach to scaling the data of the observation station to remote territories ensure the reliability of the initial data for the design of a wind power plant. The proposed methodology highlights all these aspects and offers an algorithm for evaluating the data of long-term ground-based meteorological observations on the territory of Russia.