With the rapid expansion of wind energy production in Australia, the accurate assessment of wind resource variability has become of interest to project proponents and market stakeholders, with fluctuations in the availability of wind resources impacting many aspects of project development and operation, along with energy market value and system reliability.
As the significance of wind resource variability increases, synoptic scale (or large-scale) weather patterns are of interest, capturing the movement of high and low pressure systems ranging in size from several hundred, to several thousand, kilometres. While the features of synoptic scale weather patterns inform day-to-day variability in wind speed, however, the link between synoptic scale patterns and energy market value is not widely considered by investors due to the complexity of combined meteorological and power market analysis.
In this White Paper, we measure the recurrence of synoptic scale wind regimes across south eastern Australia, specifically South Australia, Victoria and southern New South Wales, over a ten-year period from 2008-2017.
In doing so, we introduce our advanced analytics model, EnerRISK, which applies advanced data science techniques to classify different synoptic scale weather systems and measure variation in the market value of wind production, both geographically (spatially) and over time (temporally).
