Methodologies for offshore wind resource assessment

Needs for offshore wind resource assessment have been rapidly growing all over the world with increase of interests in renewable energy and of knowledge that offshore winds can be a promising energy source. However, it is generally difficult to know wind climate over coastal waters, where offshore wind farms are usually constructed, because wind observation is mostly few and moreover the winds vary complicatedly in both time and space compared with those over open oceans. In order to cope with these difficulties statistical methods using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and numerical simulation with mesoscale model such as MM5 have been proposed for offshore wind resource assessment. The first half of the tutorial will cover how offshore wind resources are evaluated by using MM5 and SAR in the case of Japanese coastal waters. The second half of the tutorial will provide not only assessment of offshore wind resources but also integrated tools for wind farm design and management considering the life cycle of the wind farm starting from site selection to decommissioning in the case of European coastal waters. This tutorial will cover the following areas. 1. Resource assessment with MM5 (Ohsawa) 2. Resource assessment with SAR (Kozai) 3. EO-wind farm and WEMSAR projects and S-WASP (Hasager and Christiansen) 4. Wake analysis (Christiansen) This tutorial is intended for not only end-users such as electric power companies but also wind energy market players, marine construction and consulting companies, and satellite information service providers.