A Comparison of Wind Flow Models for Wind Resource Assessment in Wind Energy Applications

Nicolas Gasset, Mathieu Landry and Yves Gagnon
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Nicolas Gasset: École de Technologie Supérieure, 1100 Notre-Dame Ouest, Montréal, QC H3C 1K3, Canada
Mathieu Landry: K.C. Irving Chair in Sustainable Development, Université de Moncton, Moncton, NB E1A 3E9, Canada
Yves Gagnon: K.C. Irving Chair in Sustainable Development, Université de Moncton, Moncton, NB E1A 3E9, Canada

Energies, 2012, vol. 5, issue 11, 1-35

Abstract: The objective of this work was to assess the accuracy of various coupled mesoscale-microscale wind flow modeling methodologies for wind energy applications. This is achieved by examining and comparing mean wind speeds from several wind flow modeling methodologies with observational measurements from several 50 m met towers distributed across the study area. At the mesoscale level, with a 5 km resolution, two scenarios are examined based on the Mesoscale Compressible Community Model (MC2) model: the Canadian Wind Energy Atlas (CWEA) scenario, which is based on standard input data, and the CWEA High Definition (CWEAHD) scenario where high resolution land cover input data is used. A downscaling of the obtained mesoscale wind climate to the microscale level is then performed, where two linear microscale models, i.e. , MsMicro and the Wind Atlas Analysis and Application Program (WAsP), are evaluated following three downscaling scenarios: CWEA-WAsP, CWEA-MsMicro and CWEAHD-MsMicro. Results show that, for the territory studied, with a modeling approach based on the MC2 and MsMicro models, also known as Wind Energy Simulation Toolkit (WEST), the use of high resolution land cover and topography data at the mesoscale level helps reduce modeling errors for both the mesoscale and microscale models, albeit only marginally. At the microscale level, results show that the MC2-WAsP modeling approach gave substantially better results than both MC2 and MsMicro modeling approaches due to tweaked meso-micro coupling.

Keywords: wind flow models; wind resource assessment; WAsP; MC2; MsMicro; microscale; mesoscale (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: 2012
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

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