Assessment of wind resources

Assessment of wind resources can be done in two ways; experimentally and numerically. The ideal situation would be to have long-term historical wind data for every possible wind turbine location. This information is of course not available, but a combination of experimental and numerical methods will help us towards this goal. Experimentally the wind conditions are determined in a fixed point, this data can be extrapolated in the neighbouring region in a numerical model.

In this project the wind resources along the Norwegian coast from the southern tip up to the Russian border have been assessed. The method used is a combination of numerical simulations and evaluation of the experimental data from the measurement stations along the coast.

Available long-term wind data is presented in the section "Climatology".

Numerical simulated wind fields and accumulated statistics is presented in the section "Resources".

The project

The project has been undertaken by VECTOR AS, in cooperation with the Norwegian meteorological institute. Digital map and Ortophotos have been supplied by Statens kartverk and Fjellanger Widerøe. ENOVA and The Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate has financed he wind resource assessment. Some of the work within verification has been supported by The Research Council of Norway, under NYTEK project 126645/212. The wind resource assessment has been carried out with the software package WindSim.