There is absolute consensus within the wind industry, that wind resource is a key input parameter for the initial evaluation of any seabed area for the potential development of an offshore wind project – there is no doubt of its importance, in fact, if we look at the physics behind what matters to extract Power from wind speed, we know that averaged wind resource on site counts to the power of 3!
In other words, having a site with 1 m/s more in average wind speed could lead to turbines extracting double the amount of power. Therefore, it is crucial to have wind resource data under control for any offshore wind project development.
The range of data quality, hence the uncertainty, varies tremendously depending on the stage of your project. You can find low resolution wind data sources and upgrade them to well postprocessed acquired measurements, depending on the phase of your project when you are performing bankability yield assessments.
In this article we, will dive into the project origination phases and therefore we want to describe the most popular wind resource data available.