Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants (CERC) is currently working for the Carbon Trust to develop a mesoscale modelling approach to the investigation of offshore wind farm wake effects, as part of the Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA) Programme.
The main objective is to investigate the capability of a mesoscale modelling approach to estimating long-range wake effects from offshore wind farms, i.e. the ability to predict the influence of one wind farm on the yield of another.
As part of this work, CERC has completed a review of candidate mesoscale models, covering their main features, advantages and disadvantages relevant to their offshore use.
CERC, together with Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, is currently working on setting up and running the mesoscale model WRF, in conjunction with CERC’s wind farm wake version of ADMS developed during the TOPFARM project, to calculate wind speed, turbulence and wind farm power output, over a simulation period of one year.
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Press release, May 23, 2013; Image: bard-offshore