WakeBench2 – Benchmarking of Wind Farm Flow Models

The models used by the wind industry today for estimating the electricity production and loads of wind turbines in wind farms are still not sufficiently accurate and therefore there is a strong interest from the industry on improving the current standard models. DTU has over the years developed many different types of wind farm flow models, many of which are today widely used by researchers and in industry. Therefore, it was natural for DTU to actively participate in the now finalized IEA-Task 31: Wakebench (IEAWB) project, which gathered academia and industry from all over the world in a joint effort on benchmarking various wind farm flow models on different existing datasets in order to asses model accuracy and establish a set of best-practice procedures for their usage. This participation of DTU was realized through a grant from the EUDP (EUDP-2011-II, Journal no.: 64011-0308). Recently, the scope of the IEAWB was extended from only considering wind farm (micro) scales to include both near wake and mesoscale modeling in order to cover all flow scales relevant for wind energy. Furthermore, the second phase of the IEAWB is going to focus on uncertainty quantification (UQ) since  work carried out at DTU during the first phase revealed how disregarding some inherent uncertainties in the measurements caused misinterpretation of the data and seriously corrupted the validation of the models.The purpose of this EUDP-Wakebench project is to provide continued support to the activities in the extended IEAWB, which are defined in appendix. The aim of the project is to extent the model evaluation protocol (MEP) and guidelines developed in the first phase of IEAWB to cover also near wake and mesoscale models as well as to define a consistent framework for UQ. The IEAWB is a large international collaboration involving more than 60 participant worldwide from both the research community and industry and is led by CENER (Spain), NREL (USA) and DTU. In the IEAWB project DTU is responsible for leading the activities on UQ. The EUDP-WakeBench application should finance the continued membership of Denmark to the IEAWB and support the participation of DTU to the different activities and to attend to the international workshops. Although EUDP-WakeBench is not a commercial project, there is a big industrial interest to this project. The industry expects increased confidence to existing products and more accurate models on the market and therefore the results will be accessible to the industry during the project.