Low-level jets (LLJs) are special types of non-ideal wind profiles affecting both wind energy production and loads on a wind turbine. However, among LLJ researchers, there is no consensus regarding which definition to use to identify these profiles. In this work, we compare two different ways of identifying the LLJ – the falloff definition and the shear definition – and argue why the shear definition is better suited to wind energy applications.

Sometimes, the wind changes direction between the bottom and top part of a wind turbine. This affects both the power production and the loads on the turbine. In this study, a climatology of pronounced changes in wind direction across the rotor is created, focusing on Scandinavia. The weather conditions responsible for these changes in wind direction are investigated and the climatology is compared to measurements from two coastal sites, indicating an underestimation by the climatology.

In this paper, the capacity to simulate transient wind turbine wake interaction problems using limited wind turbine data has been extended. The key novelty is the creation of two new variants of the actuator line technique in which the rotor blade forces are computed locally using generic load data. The analysis covers a partial wake interaction case between two wind turbines for a uniform laminar inflow and for a turbulent neutral atmospheric boundary layer inflow.

Non-idealized wind profiles with negative shear in part of the profile (e.g., low-level jets) frequently occur in coastal environments and are important to take into consideration for offshore wind power. Using observations from a coastal site in the Baltic Sea, we analyze in which meteorological and sea state conditions these profiles occur and study how they alter the turbulence structure of the boundary layer compared to idealized profiles.

As wind power becomes more popular, there is a growing demand for accurate power production forecasts. In this paper we investigated different methods to improve wind power forecasts for an offshore location in the Baltic Sea, using both simple and more advanced techniques. The performance of the methods is evaluated for different weather conditions. Smoothing the forecast was found to be the best method in general, but we recommend selecting which method to use based on the forecasted weather.

The complexity of wind farm operation increases as the wind farms get larger and larger. Therefore, researchers from three universities have simulated numerous different large wind farms as part of an international benchmark. The study shows how simple engineering models can capture the general trends, but high-fidelity simulations are required in order to quantify the variability and uncertainty associated with power production of the wind farms and hence the potential profitability and risks.