Modeling of the Wind Potential in the Open Sea and Its Application to the Calculation of Energy

Abstract

A reliable estimate of the wind potential in the marine atmospheric boundary layer (MABL) is of great importance to justify the energetic viability of new offshore wind farms. The purpose of the study is to provide an additional tool for the prediction of the energy that a wind turbine would produces in the open sea from the usual way of measurements at sea, that is, when they are carried out with measuring masts, where the meteorological data are obtained at levels much lower than those of a wind turbine hub. For this, the variation in the wind speed with the height in the MABL is determined, based on the Monin–Obukhov similarity theory, according to the boundary conditions of the air–sea interface, where the input data for the Validation of the results are extracted from the German FINO 3 research platform during the years 2016, 2017, and 2018. It is applied to the production of electrical energy from a 6.0 MW commercial wind turbine, with the hub at 100 m above the sea surface. As a more prominent result, the deviations from the proposed method do not exceed 2.5% in the energy calculation.

Keywords

• wind energy
• similarity theory
• atmospheric stability
• Richardson’s number
• sea surface roughness
• offshore wind turbines