Product Pick of the Week - Analysts use the MCP process to project the long-term energy potential of a proposed wind project

A company that provides energy assessments now offers data to estimate wind-energy production. According to the firm, 3TIER’s Reference Wind Time-Series can reduce uncertainty in annual production estimates, therefore helping project developers secure financing. Furthermore, EMD International A/S, developer of WindPRO wind farm software, has integrated 3TIER’s data into its software.

3TIER also offers online access to its data, and says the software provides accurate reference data at an exact hub height for 80% of the world available for download. Wind resource analysts can download three months of data at no cost to check the correlation with onsite measurements before purchase.

“Banks and financiers demand confidence that projects will be able to service their debt,” says Kenneth Westrick, founder and CEO of 3TIER. “Access to data that reduces long-term uncertainty helps address these concerns.”

The data’s numerical weather prediction modeling combines with the commonly used Measure-Correlate-Prediction (MCP). Analysts use the MCP process to project the long-term energy potential of a proposed wind project. They correlate short-term observational data from the site with a long-term record from a nearby reference site. However, MCP lacks long-term reference data, particularly in vast regions of the world where ground station observations don’t exist.

The data includes more than 30 years of 15-km resolution wind resource data, including hour-by-hour values for wind speed and direction at custom height, temperature at 2m, and air pressure at ground level.

According to a validation performed by the manufacturer, there was a 25% improvement in correlations compared to the nearest NCAR/NCEP reanalysis data point, and a 10% improvement in correlations compared to the nearest 10-m observation station. Improvements were even more extensive in areas of complex terrain. By comparison, time-series data from NCAR only provide information in 6-hour increments and at a coarse resolution of 200 km.