Improvement of AEP Predictions with Time for Swedish Wind Farms

Erik Möllerström, Sean Gregory and Aromal Sugathan
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Erik Möllerström: School of Business, Innovation and Sustainability, Halmstad University, P.O. Box 823, SE-301 18 Halmstad, Sweden
Sean Gregory: School of Business, Innovation and Sustainability, Halmstad University, P.O. Box 823, SE-301 18 Halmstad, Sweden
Aromal Sugathan: School of Business, Innovation and Sustainability, Halmstad University, P.O. Box 823, SE-301 18 Halmstad, Sweden

Energies, 2021, vol. 14, issue 12, 1-12

Abstract: Based on data from 2083 wind turbines installed in Sweden from 1988 onwards, the accuracy of the predictions of the annual energy production (AEP) from the project planning phases has been compared to the actual wind-index-corrected production. Both the electricity production and the predicted AEP come from Vindstat, a database that collects information directly from wind turbine owners. The mean error for all analyzed wind turbines was 13.0%, which means that, overall, the predicted AEP has been overestimated. There has been an improvement of accuracy with time with an overestimation of 8.2% for wind turbines installed in the 2010s, however, the continuous improvement seems to have stagnated around 2005 despite better data availability and continuous refinement of methods. Dividing the results by terrain, the error is larger for wind turbines in open and flat terrain than in forest areas, indicating that the reason behind the error is not the higher complexity of the forest terrain. Also, there is no apparent increase of error with wind farm size which could have been expected if wind farm blockage effect was a main reason for the overestimations. Besides inaccurate AEP predictions, a higher-than-expected performance decline due to inadequate maintenance of the wind turbines may be a reason behind the AEP overestimations. The main sources of error are insecurity regarding the source of AEP predictions and the omission of mid-life alterations of rated power.

Keywords: energy assessment; Vindstat; AEP; WCP; wind power; Sweden (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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