Reconstructing Data Across Met Towers to Improve Wind Energy Production Estimates
(Room Fast Track)
21 May 19
1:15 PM
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1:40 PM
Tracks:
Resource Assessment
Windographer's reconstruction algorithm takes data from multiple nearby met towers and “reconstructs” each tower’s missing or invalid observations of speed, speed standard deviation, direction, and temperature using the other towers for reference. The algorithm can extend each tower’s period of record to match that of the longest-operating tower. This presentation describes that algorithm and the results of a validation exercise that demonstrates its benefit. In the validation exercise we analyze two proposed wind energy projects, where each project comprises multiple data sets measured by nearby met towers, with two or more years of concurrent data. For each project, we truncate all but one of the data sets to one year or less, and then reconstruct the truncated data sets back to full length. We model in Openwind the output of a hypothetical wind farm, first with the original data sets, second with the truncated data sets, and third with the reconstructed data sets. The results show that reconstructed data sets produce more accurate wind farm production estimates than do the truncated data sets, indicating that reconstruction can improve the accuracy of wind farm modeling in scenarios involving a group of met towers that have different periods of record or asynchronous gaps.