Creating Synthetic Wind Speed Time Series for 15 New Zealand Wind Farms

Wind data at time scales from 10 min to 1 h are an important input for modeling the performance of wind farms and their impact on many countries’ national electricity systems. Planners need long-term realistic (i.e., meteorologically spatially and temporally consistent) wind-farm data for projects studying how best to integrate wind power into the national electricity grid. In New Zealand, wind data recorded at wind farms are confidential for commercial reasons, however, and publicly available wind data records are for sites that are often not representative of or are distant from wind farms. In general, too, the public sites are at much lower terrain elevations than hilltop wind farms and have anemometers located at 10 m above the ground, which is much lower than turbine hub height. In addition, when available, the mast records from wind-farm sites are only for a short period. In this paper, the authors describe a novel and practical method to create a multiyear 10-min synthetic wind speed time s...