Wind power forecast for the South Fork offshore wind farm

The South Fork wind farm, located 35 miles east of Montauk Point, NY, is the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm in the U.S. Offshore wind turbines operate in variable weather conditions, making it difficult to predict the energy output of the wind farm. This causes power dispatch challenges and leads to significant energy loss. To better characterize the meteorological conditions at the wind-farm scale, we develop a hierarchy of modeling methods to model the atmospheric boundary layer. Starting from the weather prediction of the entire atmosphere and the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF), we obtain the average meteorological conditions at the wind farm. Then these results are used as an input for two concurrent large-eddy simulations (LES) to generate the time-depended three-dimensional wind field. The LES model is validated with data from experiments and simulations in literature. We apply our methods on the configurations of the South Fork wind farm, an offshore wind farm consisting of 12 turbines, and study the flow fields and power output of the wind farm under different meteorological conditions. Our work enables wind farm simulations with realistic atmospheric conditions and can be useful for wind farm operations and energy forecasting.