Tesis de Maestría / master Thesis
Wind Resource Assessment with Microscale Models and a Machine Learning Method
Fecha
2020-12Registro en:
Autor
HUERTAS BOLAÑOS, MARIA ELENA; 333833
Quiroga Novoa, Pedro Fernando
Institución
Resumen
Wind energy has been gaining more prominence among renewable energy sources, as it is an
affordable and increasingly reliable technology. The precision in the evaluation of the wind
resource is, of course, a fundamental factor to guarantee the continuous development of these
types of projects. As installed capacity increases, it is natural that the new wind farms increasingly
have to be installed on more complex terrain. Therefore the methodologies that
have traditionally been used to predict mean wind speed will be subject to greater uncertainty,
given the limitations of the models under these challenging conditions. A more demanding
energy industry requires further investigation of reliable and robust methodologies to assess
available resources accurately.
In this master thesis, two approaches to predicting average wind speed in complex terrain
were evaluated. These approaches were wind flow models and statistical methods. Regarding
the wind flow models, one year of on-site measurements was used to validate two
well-known microscale models, the Wind Atlas Analysis and Application Program (WAsP)
and the WindSim model. The performance of each model was evaluated by using a crossprediction
methodology.
The second approach corresponds to a machine learning method called k-Nearest neighbor
(k-NN) regression. As its name implies, measurements from neighboring sites were used
to predict the mean speed at a target site. Terrain and climatic features were used as predictors
in the method mentioned above. By using the statistical method, the prediction errors were
reduced to 1.29%. Further improvements in the accuracy were achieved by implementing a
weight-based ensemble model between the WAsP model and the k-NN regression, with an
overall percentage error of 1.06% compared with the 5.09% and 4.31% obtained with the
WAsP model and the WindSim model, respectively.