Dutch government agency RVO has designated the IJmuiden Ver Wind Zone (IJVWFZ), located 62 km from the Netherlands’ west mainland coast, as an area for offshore development.
A consortium led by DHI, including OWC, ArcVera Renewables and ProPlanEn, assessed conditions at the project site. It found that the development of a unified WRF dataset was needed to streamline and harmonize resource assessment and metocean analysis instead of conducting these processes separately, as has been done historically, says RVO.
ArcVera developed a bespoke mesoscale dataset utilizing its proprietary weather research and forecasting model, Unified-WRF, driven by initial and boundary conditions derived from the ERA5 reanalysis enabling the assessment of energy potential across the entire development zone.
ArcVera’s Unified-WRF model was compared against other mesoscale models to ascertain its performance quality for wind resource assessment purposes. The report concluded that “the Unified-WRF model is able to represent the short-term climate at each primary measurement location.”
“The goals in creating the Unified-WRF data set were challenging because metocean analysts and wind resource assessment analysts demand different types of performance from their wind input dataset,” says ArvVera’s Mark Stoelinga, one of the report’s authors.
“Metocean analysts demand accuracy of near-surface (10 m) wind speeds, full-basin domain coverage and accuracy in simulating peak winds during storm conditions. In contrast, wind resource assessment analysts are focused on the long-term climate of hub height winds, emphasizing high spatial resolution and accurate spatial patterns of mean wind speed. The Unified-WRF dataset successfully achieved all of these requirements.”
