Journal
RENEWABLE ENERGY
Volume 36, Issue 8, Pages 2087-2096Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2011.01.025
Keywords
Climate variability; Wind power; Seasonal forecasting
Funding
- Natural Environment Research Council [NE/H01036X/1, NE/H015841/1, NE/H010378/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- NERC [NE/H01036X/1, NE/H015841/1, NE/H010378/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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Over recent years there has been an increasing deployment of renewable energy generation technologies, particularly large-scale wind farms. As wind farm deployment increases, it is vital to gain a good understanding of how the energy produced is affected by climate variations, over a wide range of time-scales, from short (hours to weeks) to long (months to decades) periods. By relating wind speed at specific sites in the UK to a large-scale climate pattern (the North Atlantic Oscillation or NAO), the power generated by a modelled wind turbine under three different NAO states is calculated. It was found that the wind conditions under these NAO states may yield a difference in the mean wind power output of up to 10%. A simple model is used to demonstrate that forecasts of future NAO states can potentially be used to improve month-ahead statistical forecasts of monthly-mean wind power generation. The results confirm that the NAO has a significant impact on the hourly-, daily- and monthly-mean power output distributions from the turbine with important implications for (a) the use of meteorological data (e.g. their relationship to large-scale climate patterns) in wind farm site assessment and, (b) the utilisation of seasonal-to-decadal climate forecasts to estimate future wind farm power output. This suggests that further research into the links between large-scale climate variability and wind power generation is both necessary and valuable. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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