Offshore Wind Resource Assessment in Rhode Island Waters

摘要

The analyses presented in this paper demonstrate the relevance of the 2-parameter Weibull distribution to accurately estimate the offshore wind power resource in the Rhode Island Ocean SAMP area. The Weibull shape parameter k shows a moderate spatial variability in most offshore areas (k≈2; as could be expected), but a higher variability in the easternmost coastal waters, in the lee of the dominant northwest winds and with southwest thermal breezes being reinforced in summer. Consequently, while assuming Rayleigh distributed winds would be reasonable offshore (k ≈ 2), this assumption would lead to an overestimation on the order of 5% of the wind resource in these coastal areas.