 Observed and global climate model based changes in wind power potential over the Northern Hemisphere during 1979–2016Qun Tian, Gang Huang, Kaiming Hu and Dev Niyogi Energy, 2019, vol. 167, issue C, 1224-1235 Abstract: Using an observed dataset, we study the changes of surface wind speeds from 1979 to 2016 over the Northern Hemisphere and their impacts on wind power potential. The results show that surface wind speeds were decreasing in the past four decades over most regions in the Northern Hemisphere, including North America, Europe and Asia. In conjunction with decreasing surface wind speeds, the wind power potential at the typical height of a commercial wind turbine was also declining over the past decades for most regions in the Northern Hemisphere. Approximately 30%, 50% and 80% of the stations lost over 30% of the wind power potential since 1979 in North America, Europe and Asia, respectively. In addition, the evaluation of climate models shows their relatively poor ability to simulate long-term temporal trends of surface winds, indicating the need for enhancing the process that can improve the reliability of climate models for wind energy assessments. Keywords: Wind energy; Wind power potential; Atmospheric stilling; Long-term temporal trend; Cumulative change; CMIP5 model simulation (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:167:y:2019:i:c:p:1224-1235 DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2018.11.027 Access Statistics for this article Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser More articles in Energy from Elsevier |
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