Performance of wind assessment datasets in United States coastal areas

Abstract. The atmospheric dynamics that occur near the intersection of land and water offer exciting and challenging opportunities for wind energy deployment in coastal locations. New models and tools are continually being developed in support of wind resource assessment, and three recent products are explored in this work for their performance in representing characteristics of the wind resource at coastal locations: the Global Wind Atlas 3 (GWA3), the 2023 National Offshore Wind data set (NOW-23), and the wind climate simulations that are a component of the Wind Integration National Dataset (WIND) Toolkit Long-term Ensemble Dataset (WTK-LED Climate). These relatively new products are freely available and user-friendly so that anyone from a utility-scale developer to a resident or business owner can evaluate the potential for wind energy generation at their location of interest.

The validations in this work provide guidance on the accuracy of wind resource assessments for coastal customers interested in installing small or midsize wind turbines (≤ 1 MW in capacity) to support energy needs at the residential, business, or community scale, such as the island and remotely located participants of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Transitions Initiative Partnership Project. At 23 coastal locations across the United States, dataset performance varies according to different evaluation metrics. All three recent datasets tend to overestimate the observed coastal wind resource. GWA3 produces the smallest annual average wind speed relative errors, whereas WTK-LED Climate is in best agreement in terms of representing diurnal wind speed cycles. NOW-23 is the highest performing of the datasets for representing seasonal and inter-annual trends in the coastal wind resource. While GWA3 and WTK-LED Climate are relatively insensitive to the dataset output heights selected for wind resource assessment at small and midsize wind turbine hub heights (20 m – 60 m), significant variation in the NOW-23 representation of wind shear across the wind profile in the lowest 100 m of the atmosphere leads to notable differences in wind speed estimates according to the dataset output heights selected for evaluation. GWA3 exhibits challenges in representation of observed wind speed diurnal cycles at small and midsize turbine hub heights, likely due to the dataset’s consistent treatment of hourly wind speed trends regardless of altitude.