the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Biases in preconstruction estimates of wind plant annul energy production
Abstract. Estimating the energy yield of a wind plant during the preconstruction phase is an historically difficult task, even with industry improvements in these estimations. We build on prior research comparing the realized energy production of wind plants and their estimated annual energy production (AEP) P50 values (median energy production), using owner-provided energy production and losses. Similar to prior studies, we found a slightly increasing bias of overestimating median energy production (6.9 % to 6.5 % as opposed to 6.7 % to 5.5 %). In addition to assessing AEP P50 bias, we compared both the 1-year and long-term AEP P90 and uncertainty energy yield assessment (EYA) estimates to the observed long-term corrected energy production. We found that neither the EYA uncertainty nor the P90 are conservative enough compared to the observed distribution of prediction errors, suggesting significant room for improvement in the EYA process.
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- RC1: 'Comment on wes-2025-127', Anonymous Referee #1, 08 Oct 2025
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RC2: 'Comment on wes-2025-127', Anonymous Referee #2, 17 Oct 2025
This is a high-quality and highly valuable paper that makes an important contribution to the wind energy community. In particular, it will help investors and financiers gain greater confidence in the assumptions underlying their investment decisions, and ultimately reducing risk and encouraging long-term investment in wind power projects.
I’ve included several comments in the attached pdf, focusing mainly on how the results could be presented in a way that is more accessible to industry professionals. My goal is to be able to share direct excerpts from the paper with colleagues who may not have a technical background, using language and framing that make the topic and its relevance more immediately clear.
I’ve also included some technical questions and suggestions for areas that could be explored further. However, these represent potential avenues for future work, and the current paper already feels complete and well-developed as it stands.
Thank you for addressing such an important topic!
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This is a very relevant and important topic, which has analysed in great detail here, resulting in insights and recommendations for further improving the accuracy of real-world wind resource assessments. In general, the paper could benefit from some graphical overviews of the applied analysis methods, because it is very difficult to lose track of exactly what has been done and what has been compared to what - especially given the large number of acronyms used. I have made specific comments directly in the paper in the attached document.