An overview of the wind power potential in the Romanian coastal environment - moving from onshore to offshore

Abstract

In the past few years in Romania the total installed capacity reached 3025MW. Because the Europe Union is pursuing to obtain an increase in renewable energy by 2020 to cover 20% of the energy consumption with renewable energy maybe in the near future in Romania the wind energy parks will start to be build off shore where the wind energy is more powerful. From this perspective, the present work is trying to provide a better picture to the wind energy resources at the Romanian shore. The measured data was provided by NOAA [1] from different points (weather stations) four along the Romanian shore and one off-shore. The measured data was compared with data from the Global Wind Atlas model [2]. According to the analysis, there are discrepancies between the measured results and those provided by the model, but the two sets of data show that in the northern part of the off-shore the power density and the wind speed is higher than in the south.