Biases in preconstruction estimates of wind plant annual energy production

Abstract

Estimating the energy yield of a wind plant during the preconstruction phase is a historically difficult task, even with industry improvements in these estimations. We build on prior research comparing the realized energy production of wind plants and their estimated annual energy production P50 values (median energy production), using owner-provided energy production and losses. We produced similar results to prior studies but with a slightly increasing bias of overestimating median energy production (a bias between realized and estimated energy production of -7.4 % to -6.6 %, depending on the scenario, as opposed to -6.7 % to -5.5 % from earlier studies). In addition to assessing annual energy production P50 bias, we compared both the 1-year and the long-term annual energy production P90 and uncertainty energy yield assessment estimates to the observed long-term-corrected energy production. We found that neither the energy yield assessment uncertainty nor the P90 is conservative enough compared to the observed distribution of prediction errors, suggesting significant room for improvement in the energy yield assessment process.