Utilizing Reanalysis and Synthesis Datasets in Wind Resource Characterization for Large-Scale Wind Integration

Abstract

As wind plants become a more substantial portion of the generation resource, the ability of and manner in which this new fleet of generation supports meeting the power system load in a given area must be quantified in order to ensure security of supply. This paper describes the manner in which a reanalysis dataset—the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Modern Era Retrospective-Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) dataset—was utilized in conjunction with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Eastern Wind Integration Dataset in order to perform an estimation of the interannual variability in wind power production as related to the capacity value of the investigated potential wind plants. Also described in the paper is a comparison of the MERRA data with publicly available wind data collected by the University of Massachusetts Wind Energy Center (UMass WEC).