Energy efficiency assessment of an aeolic plant installation in the Livorno harbour: a wind turbine performance comparison based on meteorological model estimations

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 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), or to vertically extrapolate data collected by a 10-m anemometer. The present paper is the sequel of one previously carried out, which proved the use of meteorological model wind estimations to provide aeolic efficiency performances being comparable with those based on experimental data. In particular, the WRF-NMM prognostic meteorological model has been used to calculate wind estimations, which actually are part of a meteorological archive which was developed at LaMMA laboratory starting from numerical elaborations provided by the weather forecasting service. A sample application was performed through the installation of an aeolic plant in the industrial harbour of Livorno, Italy. After the wind resource pattern has been analysed by using typical distributions and statistical indicators, a site energy efficiency assessment has been carried out by comparing three different kind of wind turbines basing on rated power: the sizes of 1300, 2000 and 3000 KW have been taken into account. In particular, the comparison has been made between NORDEX N60, ENERCON E82 and ECOTÈCNIA 100 wind turbines.