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Energy Systems and Technologies for the Coming Century ...

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A high resolution global wind atlas - improvingestimation of world wind resourcesJake Badger <strong>and</strong> Hans Ejsing JørgensenWind <strong>Energy</strong> Division, Risø National Laboratory <strong>for</strong> Sustainable <strong>Energy</strong>, TechnicalUniversity of Denmark (DTU), Roskilde, DenmarkAbstractCurrently, policy makers <strong>and</strong> energy planners trying to tackling <strong>the</strong> challenges of climatechange <strong>and</strong> seeking approaches <strong>for</strong> climate change mitigation, have no global windresource dataset appropriate <strong>for</strong> <strong>the</strong>ir pressing needs. The current practice of globalenergy modellers is to use coarse resolution reanalysis datasets. This has <strong>the</strong> seriousshortcoming that <strong>the</strong> wind energy resource is underestimated, as small scale variabilityof winds is missing. This missing variability is responsible <strong>for</strong> a large part of <strong>the</strong> windresource not being captured in <strong>the</strong> analysis. Crucially it is <strong>the</strong> windiest sites that suffer<strong>the</strong> largest wind resource errors; in simple terrain <strong>the</strong> windiest sites may beunderestimated by 25% <strong>for</strong> complex terrain <strong>the</strong> underestimate can be 100%.The framework <strong>for</strong> <strong>the</strong> methodology, laid out in this paper, is a global method, which isrelative fast <strong>and</strong> economical to complete. The method employs large-scale globalmeteorological datasets (reanalysis), which are downscaled to high-resolution windresource datasets via a so-called generalization step, <strong>and</strong> microscale modelling usingWAsP developed at Risø DTU. A new feature of WAsP allows calculation of highresolution resource maps covering extensive areas. For <strong>the</strong> purpose of downscaling highresolutiondatasets surface elevation <strong>and</strong> roughness lengths need to be derived fromglobal topography <strong>and</strong> l<strong>and</strong> cover datasets. New <strong>and</strong> improved meteorological datasets<strong>and</strong> topographical datasets, in <strong>the</strong> public domain, are becoming available. All data <strong>and</strong><strong>the</strong> tools necessary are present, so <strong>the</strong> time is right to link <strong>the</strong> parts toge<strong>the</strong>r to create amuch needed dataset.Geospatial in<strong>for</strong>mation systems (GIS) will be one of <strong>the</strong> significant applications of <strong>the</strong>Global Wind Atlas datasets. As location of wind resource, <strong>and</strong> its relationships topopulation centres, electrical transmission grids, terrain types, <strong>and</strong> protected l<strong>and</strong> areasare important parts of <strong>the</strong> resource assessment downstream of <strong>the</strong> generation of windclimate statistics. Related to <strong>the</strong>se issues of integration are <strong>the</strong> temporal characteristics<strong>and</strong> spatial correlation of <strong>the</strong> wind resources. These aspects will also be addressed by <strong>the</strong>Global Wind Atlas.The Global Wind Atlas, through a transparent methodology, will provide a unified, highresolution, <strong>and</strong> public domain dataset of wind energy resources <strong>for</strong> <strong>the</strong> whole world. Thewind atlas data will be <strong>the</strong> most appropriate wind resource dataset available <strong>for</strong> <strong>the</strong> needsof policy makers, energy planners <strong>and</strong> <strong>the</strong> Integrated Assessment Modelling (IAM)community.1 IntroductionThe current status <strong>and</strong> coverage of wind resource assessment around <strong>the</strong> world is acollection of more or less ad hoc studies, using a broad range of methods, <strong>and</strong> in turnproviding resource products with different specifications <strong>and</strong> types. The incompletecoverage is natural enough, as wind resource assessments—usually made on a countrywidescale or smaller—have followed needs <strong>and</strong> motivations on a country by countrybasis, <strong>and</strong> <strong>the</strong>se are very much dependent on each individual case. The broad range ofmethods <strong>and</strong> product types is a product of <strong>the</strong> number of centres <strong>and</strong> companies that areRisø International <strong>Energy</strong> Conference 2011 Proceedings Page 215

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