Meteorological aspects of offshore wind energy: Observations from the Vindeby wind farm

The Vindeby monitoring project has been established to provide information on the world's first offshore wind farm at Vindeby, Denmark. Over the course of the project, different aspects of offshore meteorology which are relevant to offshore wind energy production will be examined in addition to turbine loading and behaviour in offshore conditions. Here, the simplest aspects of coastal meteorology are investigated, namely, wind speed differences between land and sea, wind speed profiles, diurnal variability and turbine wake effects. Observations are compared with simple prediction methods in order to test commonly held assumptions about the differences between the wind climate over land and sea and also with results from Risø's WAsP model.