Wind Resource Assessment in Cold Regions - A Numerical Case Study

This paper describes a case study of wind resource assessment in cold climate region. One-year SCADA data from a wind park has been used to make a comparison with the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) based numerical simulations of wind resource assessment and Annual Energy Production (AEP). To better understand the wind turbine wake flow effects on the energy production, ‘Jessen wake model ‘is used for the numerical simulations. Results show wind resource maps at different elevations, where wind turbine wake flow effects the wind turbine performance and resultant power production. CFD simulations provided a good insight of the flow behavior across each wind turbine, which helped to better understand the wind turbine wake flow effects on wind turbine performance and annual energy production. A good agreement is found between numerical simulations and field SCADA data analysis in this study.