Background

There are increasing constraints on the development of wind power on land. Recently, there has been a move to  develop wind power offshore, however the amount of measured wind speed data at potential offshore wind farm sites is sparse.

The POWER project aimed to assess the offshore wind power potential in European Union waters, taking into account coastal effects and highlighting those sea areas where hazardous wind or wave conditions exist. These estimates can then be used to pinpoint areas which are favourable for siting a wind farm. More detailed monitoring can then be undertaken to improve the initial wind power estimates at a selected site.

Methodology

A methodology was developed which can produce long-term and spatially detailed estimates of the wind speed at offshore sites covering a wide area:

1. The geostrophic wind over the sea area of interest will be calculated from long-term pressure fields.

2. The geostrophic wind will be transformed to sea level using WAsP, taking account of nearshore topography.

3. The sea level winds will be corrected for land/sea climatology (stability) effects using an analytical Coastal Discontinuity Model (CDM),

The final values were validated against existing offshore datasets. On completion of the project, a CD-ROM of the final results in a GIS format was produced for use by project participants.

Project Timescale

Work on the POWER project began in August 1998 and finished in July 2001.

Project Partners

Organisation:	Country:	Contact(s):
STFC (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory), Energy Research Unit	UK	Jim Halliday
Ecofys	The Netherlands	Jan Coelingh
KEMA  Sustainable	The Netherlands	Hans Cleijne
Risø National Laboratory, Department of Wind Energy and Atmospheric Physics	Denmark	Rebecca Barthelmie
University of East Anglia, Climatic Research Unit	UK	Tom Holt

Acknowledgements

The project partners would like to acknowledge the support of the Directorate General XII of the European Commission who are providing part funding for this project under the JOULE programme, contract JOR3-CT98-0286.

Final Reports

• A brief overview report
• Final Report
  • Contents
  • Executive Summary
  • Chapter 1 : Background to the POWER project
  • Chapter 2 : Introduction to the POWER project
  • Chapter 3 : Calculating geostrophic winds from sea-level pressure data
  • Chapter 4 : Transforming geostrophic winds to turbine hub-heights using WASP
  • Chapter 5 : The coastal discontinuity model
  • Chapter 6 : SODAR measurements
  • Chapter 7 : Variability of offshore winds
  • Chapter 8 : Wind and wave loading
  • Chapter 9 : Confidence limits for monthly wind speeds
  • Chapter 10 : Comparisons with measured data
  • Chapter 11 : The POWER software tool
  • Appendix : Publications and conferences
  • Whole Report as one document (23 MB)

Papers

The following papers have been produced by the POWER project team.

• POWER - A methodology for predicting offshore wind energy resources (Paper presented at BWEA21, September 1999, PDF format 164kB, 6 pages)

• Using SODAR measurements in the POWER project (PDF: 205kB, 5 pages)

• POWER - A methodology for predicting offshore wind energy resources Main text and Appendix 1 (Paper presented at OWEMES2000, April 2000)