Resource and Project Energy Assessment 2018

Sessions Speakers Buzz

A Monte Carlo-based approach to assessing annual energy production and uncertainty

11 Sep 18
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Tracks: Data Science and Digitalization, Poster Presentation

The industry standard approach to assessing annual energy production (AEP) uncertainty can be limited due to the assumption of uncorrelated uncertainty categories, subjectivity in calculations, and the need for an ‘energy-velocity ratio’ to convert wind resource uncertainty to energy uncertainty. These limitations are overcome by a Monte Carlo-based approach to the AEP process in which inputs to the assessment, as well as intermediate calculations, are randomly sampled based on their individual uncertainties. By repeating the assessment thousands of times, a distribution of AEP values results from which AEP uncertainty is deduced. In this presentation, the improvements of a Monte Carlo approach over the industry standard will be demonstrated in the context of assessing AEP based on operational data. A large set of wind projects from the EIA-923 database will be leveraged in this effort.