A new reference wind year approach to estimate long term wind characteristics

Abstract

The typical meteorological year (TMY) method has common applications in building energy performance and solar energy studies. However, there is not any well accepted method for the wind energy applications such as the TMY. In the present study, a new reference year approach is proposed for wind energy applications. By using the proposed method, the reference wind year (RWY) datasets may be generated as in the TMY methodology for any measurement station which has the possibility to be used as a reference station in the measure-correlate-predict (MCP) analyses. The MCP calculations are so significant to estimate the long term wind conditions for a candidate wind farm site. In this study, a case study is performed for Turkey after giving the details of the proposed method. The results for the RWY approach has a good agreement with the long term data as in the TMY method. Therefore, the RWY concept has the possibility to make the MCP studies easier and faster.