Wind Shear Investigation for Site-Specific Wind Turbine Performance Assessment

The wind energy assessment studies are generally performed referring to neutral stability conditions for the atmosphere; this is considered a good hypothesis because neutral conditions characterize the high wind situations. However the increasing size of modern multi megawatt wind turbines allows to produce energy even in low wind regimes and non-neutral conditions can involve significant production period. In such situations the variations of the vertical wind shear can affect the energy production in a sensible way and it could be fundamental to investigate how atmospheric stability and orography can affect the wind profile and the power conversion. In this paper meso-scale numerical data, CFD modeling and remote sensed wind data were used in order to analyze such behavior and to understand how wind shear influences the energy content and the discussion about how to adjust the power curve to the site specific conditions.