3TIER Offers Access to More Accurate Global Wind Data

3TIER Reference Wind Time-Series provide accurate, 30+ year reference data at an exact hub height for any location in the world, with data for 80% of the world available for immediate, on-demand download. Wind resource analysts can download three months of data at no cost to check the correlation with onsite measurements before purchase. For more information, please visit www.3tier.com/en/package_detail/reference-wind-time-series/.

“Worldwide competition for capital to build wind farm projects is intense,” said Kenneth Westrick, founder and CEO of 3TIER, a global leader in renewable energy information services. “Today, banks and financiers demand a higher level of confidence that wind power projects will be able to service their debt. Fast and cost-effective access to global resource data that reduces long-term uncertainty helps address these concerns and is an important step forward for the industry.”

EMD International A/S, developer and distributor of WindPRO, the world’s premiere wind farm planning and design software, conducted its own validation studies of 3TIER’s Reference Wind Time-Series prior to integrating the data offering into its software. The studies were performed in different regions of the world where EMD had access to reliable, long-term wind measurements from tall towers.

“We found that 3TIER’s reference time-series significantly reduce the long-term correction error compared to data from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which is often the only option available due to the lack of reliable long-term ground measurements,” said Per Nielsen, manager and senior wind consultant of EMD International A/S. “Using 3TIER’s reference data lowers the uncertainty of the annual energy production (AEP) calculation and provides a more bankable result.”

3TIER’s Reference Wind Time-Series bring the advantages of numerical weather prediction (NWP) modeling to the commonly used technique of Measure-Correlate-Predict (MCP). The MCP process is used by analysts to project the long-term energy potential of a proposed wind turbines project by correlating short-term observational data from the site with a long-term record from a nearby reference site. However, a significant weakness of MCP is the lack of high-quality, long-term reference data, particularly in vast regions of the world were long-term ground station observations simply don’t exist.

3TIER’s Wind Reference Time-Series provide 30+ years of 15 km resolution wind resource data, including hour-by-hour values for:

– Wind speed and direction at a custom height

– Temperature at 2 m

– Air pressure at 0 m

3TIER also performed its own extensive validation of the reference time-series in an analysis of data from more than 450 U.S tall towers. That validation showed a 25 percent improvement in correlations compared to the nearest NCAR/NCEP reanalysis data point, and a 10 percent improvement in correlations compared to the nearest 10 m observation station. Improvements were even more dramatic in areas of complex terrain. 3TIER’s hourly, 15 km resolution time-series data is available globally. By comparison, time-series data from NCAR only provide information in 6-hour increments and at a coarse resolution of 200 km.

www.3tier.com/en/