WIND FLOW MODELING - Wind Resource Assessment: A Practical Guide to Developing a Wind Project - page 175

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WIND FLOW MODELING
The main purpose of wind flow modeling is to estimate the wind resource at every
proposed or potential wind turbine location so that the wind plant's energy production
can be calculated and its design optimized. This usually means extrapolating from
the wind resource measured at one or more meteorological towers using a numerical
wind flow model of some kind.
In an ideal world, wind flow modeling, just like shear and long-term climate adjust-
ments, would not be necessary. Wind measurements would be taken at every likely
turbine location to eliminate any possibility of significant error. However, for most
projects, this would be an expensive proposition. In practice, wind flow modeling is
an essential part of the wind resource practitioner's toolkit. It is also one of the largest
sources of uncertainty in most energy production estimates.
Aside from estimating the variation in the wind resource across the project area,
wind flow modeling must account for each turbine's influence on the operation of other
turbines, the so-called wake effect. Wake modeling is usually performed separately
from wind flow modeling using specialized software. It is discussed in Chapter 16.
Unlike most other chapters in this topic, this chapter does not present a pre-
ferred method or modeling approach. There are simply too many methods with very