Towards high resolution, validated and open global wind power assessments

TL;DR

This paper introduces ETHOS.RESKit.Wind, an open source, validated global wind power simulation tool with high resolution, designed to improve reliability in wind energy deployment planning.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive, validated, and open source wind power simulation tool with high spatial resolution and extensive calibration using global measurements.

Findings

Achieved a mean error of 0.006 in capacity factor estimation.

Attained a Pearson correlation of 0.865 with observed data.

Validated performance against multiple wind power data sources.

Abstract

Wind power is expected to play a crucial role in future net-zero energy systems, but wind power simulations to support deployment strategies vary drastically in their results, hindering reliable design decisions. Therefore, we present a transparent, open source, validated and evaluated, global wind power simulation tool ETHOS.RESKit.Wind with high spatial resolution and customizable designs for both onshore and offshore wind turbines. The tool provides a comprehensive validation and calibration procedure using over 16 million global measurements from metrerological masts and wind turbine sites. We achieve a global average capacity factor mean error of 0.006 and Pearson correlation of 0.865. In addition, we evaluate its performance against several aggregated and statistical sources of wind power generation. The release of ETHOS.RESKit.Wind is a step towards a fully open source and open data approach to accurate wind power modeling by incorporating the most comprehensive simulation advances in one model.