An Assessment of the Discrepancy Between Operational Assessment and Wind Resource Assessment for a Wind Farm in Ireland

Abstract: An accurate wind resource assessment (WRA) is crucial in energy prediction as the power is directly proportional to the wind speed cubed. This thesis analyses the discrepancy between operational assessment and WRA for a wind farm located on a moderately complex terrain in Ireland. As part of this research, a WRA was undertaken and the results were input to two wind farm design tools, WindPro and WindSim, to estimate the annual energy production. Two and a half years of data was available from a 50m met mast. The data was analysed and filtered to ascertain and limit the usage of erroneous data. The dataset was then correlated with an available online dataset utilising the Measure Correlate Predict (MCP) module in WindPro in order to estimate the long term wind resource at the site. The wind resource was then used to determine the annual energy produced at the site using both WindPro and WindSim. A loss of 8% was applied to the energy calculations for comparison with the original WRA. The results demonstrate the energy production from the original energy prediction, undertaken by a leading wind consultancy prior to construction, was overestimated by an average 10.19% over the three years of operation. The averaged wind speed at hub height in the original WRA was 8.2m/s. However, the prediction undertaken using WindPro in this study estimated an average hub height wind speed of 8.0m/s while WindSim estimated an average of 7.36m/s. These differing results had a significant contribution to the difference in Annual Energy Production (AEP). The calculated annual energy results were an overestimation of energy production by an average of 8.10% utilising WindPro, while WindSim underestimated the energy output by just 0.11%.