Posters

Abstract

Will climate change drive a significant change to energy yield production within the lifetime of a wind farm? With the increasing number of onshore and offshore wind farms under development and increasing operational lifetimes, extending operations beyond 2050, the industry would benefit from more knowledge about the impact of climate change in energy yield production and, ultimately, in revenues. The impact of climate change is sometimes (but often not) considered in energy yield assessment by simply applying a pragmatic uncertainty due to limited knowledge in this field and the large uncertainty around the future climate change scenario. This high-level approach is generally informed based on the expected future variability of annual wind speeds predicted by climate models. While the expected trend in annual wind speed is a good indicator of how the wind resource can evolve, extremes might show a different trend. The quantification of a change in energy production only based on variations in annual average wind speeds therefore remains uncertain; moreover, methods with which to quantify uncertainty and downscale climate model data to energy yield assessment are unclear. Wind farm energy production is highly dependent on the non-linear shape of the power curve and the shape of the wind speed frequency distribution. Due to unresolved sub-daily variabilities of climate models, the evolution of wind speed frequency distributions is not investigated as part of energy yield assessments. In this study, an approach about how to downscale Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) modelled daily data to sub-daily variability, and how best to cascade inter-model General Circulation Models (GCM) uncertainty from CMIP6 models is investigated to assess the impact of climate change on the wind speed frequency distribution and energy yield.