The Carbon Trust’s Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA) has initiated an international competition to improve wind resource models in the offshore wind industry. The competition will enable modellers access to six validation cases from operational wind farms in the North Sea, owned by the OWA’s industry partners.
The OWA partners aspire that this open source, collaborative methodology will advance the industry and enable more accurate energy yield predictions.
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Different validation datasets, taken from operational wind farms, will span various wind conditions regarding wind farm topology and wind climate characteristics. These will be used to strength-test wind resource predictions, by comparing those predictions to real world examples.
The benchmarking process is open for model developers and end-users to take part anonymously. The competition will run through several rounds through to December 2019. The work is expected to provide a universally agreed methodology for validating wake models.
The competition is being led by CENER and managed by the Carbon Trust with funding from the OWA partners; namely, the Scottish Government, EnBW, E.ON, Iberdrola, Innogy, Ørsted, Shell, SSE, Equinor, and Vattenfall.
The continued improvement in wake modelling for the offshore wind industry has been a key theme under the OWA programme, and the value of assessing modelling against actual operational data is one of the most valuable exercises we can do as a group to support the offshore wind industry
stated, Liam Leahy, offshore wind manager at the Carbon Trust and programme manager for the OWA’s wakes and wind resource technical working group.