(Carbon-free) Power to the people!
We develop a modeling framework comprising; (a) new methods for efficiently developing a robust assessment of power production from offshore wind turbines with WRF, (b) new metrics to quantify the spatial extent and intensity of wind turbine wakes, (c) generalized first-order scaling rules that describe how “wake shadows” from large offshore wind farms scale with prevailing meteorology and wind turbine installed densities.
The excellent wind resource and proximity to large markets along the U.S. east coast mean it is the focus of America’s first-phase offshore wind projects. The scale of these installations raises questions regarding potential reductions of electrical power production efficiency due to the operation of wind turbines in disturbed flow (wakes) from upwind wind turbines and wind farms. It requires detailed and robust numerical tools.
The excellent wind resource and proximity to large markets along the U.S. east coast mean it is the focus of America’s first-phase offshore wind projects. The scale of these installations raises questions regarding potential reductions of electrical power production efficiency due to the operation of wind turbines in disturbed flow (wakes) from upwind wind turbines and wind farms. It requires detailed and robust numerical tools. The pace of the planning adds an additional requirement that the simulations be representative of the wide suite of atmospheric conditions under which the turbines will operate but not require years of simulation time. This work provides a new framework for performing climatologically representative simulations, new metrics to describe the intensity and spatial extent of wakes from wind farms and fully generalizable scaling rules how the wind farm wake spatial extent scales with wind speed, turbulence, and boundary layer height and the density of wind turbines deployed.