Davis, Neil, Andrea Hahmann, Niels-Erik Clausen, DTU
Wind Energy, Roskilde, Denmark, and Mark Zagar, Vestas Technology R&D
Aarhus, Denmark
Icing on wind turbines
has been identified as a problem for placing turbines in cold climates. These
problems include both health and safety risks due to ice throw, and increased
economic risks due to uncertainty of power estimates and the potential for
decreased machine lifetimes due to the additional loadings. The ability to
forecast icing both near term and climatologically could aid in the
quantification of these risks, thereby improving the risk management. The
forecasting model we are developing relies on the accurate simulation of cloud
amount, temperature and wind speed from a mesoscale model. In this study, nine WRF simulations
testing three microphysical schemes and three boundary layer schemes are
evaluated over two European domains. The models are evaluated using satellite
data, the meteorological observational network, and observations at 2 wind
parks of interest. In addition to evaluating the model against measures of
cloudiness, temperature and wind speed, the simulation results were used as
input to an icing model, which
estimated ice amount and ice duration at the wind parks of interest, allowing
us to evaluate these results against similar parameters from the wind parks
themselves.