Wind power estimation on local scale—A case study of representativeness of reanalysis data and data-driven analysis

With hydropower being the dominant source of renewable energy in Austria and recent years being disproportionally dry, alternative renewable energy sources need to be tapped to compensate for the reduction of fossil fuels and account for dry conditions. This becomes even more important given the current geopolitical situation. Wind power plays an essential role in decarbonizing Austria's electricity system. For local assessments of historic, recent, and future wind conditions, adequate climate data are essential. Reanalysis data, often used for such assessments, have a coarse spatial resolution and could be unable to capture local wind features relevant for wind power modeling. Thus, raw reanalysis data need post-processing, and the results need to be interpreted with care. The purpose of this study is to assess the quality of three reanalysis data sets, such as MERRA-2, ERA5, and COSMO-REA6, for both surface level and hub height wind speed and wind power production at meteorological observation sites and wind farms in flat and mountainous terrain. Furthermore, the study aims at providing a first knowledge baseline toward generating a novel wind speed and wind power atlas at different hub heights for Austria with a spatial resolution of 1 × 1 km and for an experimental region with sub-km resolution. Thus, the study tries to answer (i) the questions if the reanalysis and analysis data can reproduce surface-level wind speed and (ii) if wind power calculations based on these data can be trusted, providing a knowledge base for future wind speed and wind power applications in complex terrain.For that purpose, a generalized additive model (GAM) is applied to enable a data-driven gridded surface wind speed analysis as well as extrapolation to hub heights as a first step toward generating a novel wind speed atlas. In addition, to account for errors due to the coarse grid of the re-analysis, the New European Wind Atlas (NEWA) and the Global Wind Atlas (GWA) are used for correction using an hourly correction factor accounting for diurnal variations. For the analysis of wind power, an empirical turbine power curve approach was facilitated and applied to five different wind sites in Austria.The results showed that for surface-level wind speed, the GAM outperforms the reanalysis data sets across all altitude levels with a mean average error (MAE) of 1.65 m/s for the meteorological sites. It even outperforms the NEWA wind atlas, which has an MAE of 3.78 m/s. For flat regions, the raw reanalysis matches the production data better than NEWA, also for hub height wind speeds, following wind power. For the mountainous areas, a correction of the reanalysis data based on the NEWA climatology, or even the NEWA climatology itself, significantly improved wind power evaluations. Comparisons between modeled wind power time series and real data show mean absolute errors of 8% of the nominal power in flat terrain and 14 or 17% in mountainous terrain.