Energy efficiency assessment of an aeolic plant installation in the Livorno harbour: a station vs. model comparison

Exploiting wind resource is a good alternative in spite of using traditional not renewable and polluting energy sources. However, besides landscape restrictions and administrative practice complexity, it is generally hard to locate a site to be eligible for aeolic exploitation as well as to assess its related wind resource. As a matter of fact, an expensive wind measuring campaign should be carried out for that, through at least one year long period at the height aeolic plants typically work (60 to 80 m), which is far higher than the anemometers one. To achieve such a goal, an alternative approach is to use either vertically extrapolated anemometer data or meteorological model calculated estimations. In the present paper a comparison between these two approaches is presented, by taking as a sample application the installation of an aeolic plant in the harbour of Livorno, Italy. The WRF-NMM prognostic meteorological model has been used to provide wind estimations. A er the site energy efficiency assessment has been carried out by using the typical statistical indicators and plots, the use of WRF-modelled estimations proved to fairly supply the need of an expensive measuring campaign: as a matter of fact, model estimations not only cover locations in complex terrain, but also represent vertical profiles, thus providing winds at heights upper than the anemometer ones.