InnoWind: Innovation for global wind energy exploitation on land using satellites

InnoWind will progress the assessment of wind energy resources beyond the state of-the-art by pushing for the applied use of the Copernicus Global Land Service products, pan-European high-resolution products, and Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar and Sentinel-2 optical satellite observations. Specifically, vegetation layers such as forest type and tree cover density in combination with leaf area, fractional vegetation cover, and other plant parameters will be combined to derive the surface drag force. The surface drag force is closely related to the plant physical structure interacting with the wind. The surface drag has a dramatic influence on the wind resource, in particular for tall vegetation. 75% of new land-based wind farms are planned in or near forests. InnoWind focuses on the development of a novel surface drag product based on optical and synthetic aperture radar from methods used in forestry, agriculture and other applications. This new approach could eliminate current indirect and subjective assessment of surface properties, reduce the uncertainty on the wind resource and lead to more automatic and consistent assessments. InnoWind will quantify the effect through a series of trial cases at global sites.