How climate data can help improve planning within the wind sector

Introduction

The Copernicus Earth Observation Programme is a €4 billion project funded by the European Union providing free data and tools to understand environmental change. This abstract outlines how the European Climatic Energy Mixes (ECEM) project, a pilot project of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), one of six Copernicus services, is using climate data from the programme to support the wind industry.

Approach

The Copernicus Programme is a global network of thousands of land, air and marine based sensors, as well as a family of dedicated satellites, making millions of observations a day to build a comprehensive picture of the Earth’s climate. C3S will combine observations of the climate system with the latest science to develop authoritative, quality-assured information about the past, current and future states of the climate in Europe and worldwide. Proof of concepts such as the ECEM are using this data to develop demonstrators, as part of the C3S pilot projects, to enable the wind industry to plan for and adapt to Europe’s changing climate.

Main body of abstract

The ability to use data from thousands of global sensors has a wide range of applications, from identifying prime locations for new wind turbine developments to mitigating climate risk by understanding how windstorms could impact the industry. C3S will help provide innovative solutions to challenges within the industry; in particular how to forecast wind yield and identify viable opportunities for wind development and storage investment within Europe’s generation mix.

ECEM is a proof of concept climate service that is working to enable the energy industry and policy makers to assess how different energy supply mixes in Europe will meet demand over different time horizons, from seasonal to long-term planning spanning decades.

By assessing the uncertainty of seasonal climate forecasts and projections, ECEM will inform climate-sensitive energy projects, such as wind, about their production under varying climate conditions and how they would meet demand at the European scale under differing energy generation scenarios.

The presentation presents an assessment of wind speed and power as produced by essential historical datasets called reanalyses taking many wind speed measurements, including tower data, as reference. Two scaling methods are compared to calibrate the reanalysis, for both on-shore and offshore locations. This calibration is a key first step to providing a benchmark for climate model data such as climate forecasts and projections.

An assessment of the physical coherence/co-variability between calibrated wind speed and other climate variables, such as solar radiation, is also carried out to achieve an optimal spatial and temporal co-variability, which is critical when attempting to achieve a balanced energy supply.

Conclusion

Harnessing data is integral to the future of the wind industry, from identifying the best locations to place turbines and target investment to ensuring that projects and infrastructure are sustainable as Europe’s climate continues to change.

The calibration of wind speed as produced by a widely used re-analysis product, ERA-Interim, as the basis wind resource assessments, is discussed with this presentation. Many measurement stations, both on-shore and offshore, are used for this calibration.

This work is also important in pointing to the dominant climate drivers influencing overall supply-demand balance at both national and continental scales, such as in the case of winter-time North Atlantic Oscillation, which can have a profound influence on wind power.

The outcomes of ECEM’s work can help provide methods for the wind industry to plan its long-term future.


Learning objectives
• The ways in which energy supply and demand over Europe are affected by the spatial and temporal variations of their climate drivers;
• How climate modelling can enable the wind industry to target development and investment.