Supervisors - Prof. Gareth Harrison, University of Edinburgh and Dr. Wolf Fruh, Heriot-Watt University
PhD Student - Michael Balir, University of Edinburgh
Status - Closed
Energy yield assessment is the single most important factor in building a business case for a prospective wind farm development. For a development opportunity to be financially attractive, it needs to offer both competitive returns and a high degree of certainty.
SSE has around 1.5GW of installed onshore wind capacity in operation and a further 2.5GW in the pipeline – this is contributing significantly to the increasing penetration of wind in the UK energy market. Accurate short-term forecasting is of increasing importance to SSE, the wind industry and National Grid, due to the volatility that this increasing wind penetration causes to the supply market. Obtaining competitive prices for generated energy and fulfilling the requirements of the grid code requires accurate nomination of wind farm power output over a range of forecast horizons in varying wind conditions.
The key challenge for the wind industry is to ‘de-risk’ investment in wind farms and manage the transition to a high-wind penetration – but highly predictable – energy market. However, wind energy resource assessment and forecasting are still developing fields: work is ongoing in many areas to refine energy predictions/forecasts and to include effects which were previously neglected.
One such effect, which could prove key in the effort to improve energy estimates and short-term forecasts, is atmospheric stability. This is an area which ties together the generally well understood components of wind energy resource assessment (wind speed and direction, wind shear, turbulence, wake effects) with larger-scale meteorological effects, which haven’t traditionally been incorporated into industry-standard approaches.
From a brief review of the available literature, it can be seen that measuring/classifying atmospheric stability states and incorporating the effects into flow models are two distinct work streams (the proposed work will concentrate on the former, although the latter is being pursued in tandem within SSE). There exists plenty of scope to validate proposed measurement methods, using the data and resources at SSE’s disposal, to define and standardise the approach and to develop original classification techniques.
From 2013-14, SSE deployed a range of instrumentation on both onshore and offshore sites across the UK, designed to measure atmospheric stability. The analysis of this data and interpretation of results will form the central part of this work.