Impacts of Climatic Variability and Climatic Change on Wind Energy Resources

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9422355 ROBESON Wind-generated electricity has been viewed as one of the least expensive and most abundant forms of energy. Although considerable attention has been given to overcoming technological impediments to its use, far less work has been undertaken to explore the physical characteristics of wind that affect its utility as an energy resource. Foremost among those characteristics is the variability of wind over a variety of geographic and temporal scales. The continued development of wind resources therefore requires better understanding of the influence of climatic variability and possible climatic change on the intra-annual and inter-annual variability of wind. This project will explore methodological issues inherent in the development of more accurate and more finely refined wind resource maps by explicitly considering the effects of regional wind variability, including statistical analyses of trends, periodicities, and autocorrelation. It will examine temporal variations over shorter time periods, using data gathered from 1961 through 1990 at a number of climatic stations in the northern Great Plains states of North Dakota and South Dakota to develop time series of wind power using one-hour, daily, and monthly average wind speeds. Following generation of those time series, they will be statistically decomposed into a number of components, including linear, daily, and seasonal trends. These components will be used to explore new forms of time-series models for wind power. This pilot project will facilitate refinement of statistical approaches that can be used to improve knowledge about factors that affect wind variability. This new knowledge should provide the basis for updating maps of wind resources in the U.S., and it will permit refined assessments of the potential for developing wind as an energy resource in different parts of the nation.