The Wind Integration National Dataset (WIND) Toolkit

Regional wind integration studies in the United States require detailed wind power output data at many locations to perform simulations of how the power system will operate under high-penetration scenarios. The wind data sets that serve as inputs into the study must realistically reflect the ramping characteristics, spatial and temporal correlations, and capacity factors of the simulated wind plants, as well as be time synchronized with available load profiles. The Wind Integration National Dataset (WIND) Toolkit described in this article fulfills these requirements as the largest and most complete grid integration data set publicly available to date. A meteorological data set, wind power production time series, and simulated forecasts created using the Weather Research and Forecasting Model run on a 2-km grid over the continental United States at a 5-min resolution is now publicly available for more than 126,000 land-based and offshore wind power production sites. State-of-the-art forecast accuracy was mimicked by reforecasting the years 2007–2013 using industry-standard techniques. Our meteorological and power validation results show that the WIND Toolkit data is satisfactory for wind energy integration studies. Users are encouraged to validate according to their phenomena and application of interest.