IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/appene/v281y2021ics0306261920314835.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Atmospheric pressure gradients and Coriolis forces provide geophysical limits to power density of large wind farms

Author

Listed:
  • Antonini, Enrico G.A.
  • Caldeira, Ken

Abstract

The geophysical limit to maximum land-area power density of large wind farms is related to the rate of replenishment of kinetic energy removed from the atmosphere by wind turbines. Although observations and numerical simulations have indicated an upper bound to the power density in the order of 1 W/m2, no theoretical foundation has yet been provided. Here, we study the role of atmospheric pressure gradients and the latitude-dependent Coriolis parameter in the power density of large-scale wind farms by means of both numerical atmospheric simulations and analytic expressions. We illustrate that energy transport to regional-scale wind farms is primarily governed by horizontal pressure gradients and their interaction with the Coriolis force and turbine-induced surface drag within the latitude-dependent Ekman layer. Higher pressure gradients and lower Coriolis parameters promote higher energy availability and, consequently, higher potential power density, suggesting that the power density of regional-scale wind farms is largely resource- and location-dependent.

Suggested Citation

  • Antonini, Enrico G.A. & Caldeira, Ken, 2021. "Atmospheric pressure gradients and Coriolis forces provide geophysical limits to power density of large wind farms," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 281(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:appene:v:281:y:2021:i:c:s0306261920314835
    DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2020.116048
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261920314835
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.apenergy.2020.116048?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Pope, K. & Dincer, I. & Naterer, G.F., 2010. "Energy and exergy efficiency comparison of horizontal and vertical axis wind turbines," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 35(9), pages 2102-2113.
    2. Antonini, Enrico G.A. & Romero, David A. & Amon, Cristina H., 2019. "Improving CFD wind farm simulations incorporating wind direction uncertainty," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 133(C), pages 1011-1023.
    3. Yu-Ting Wu & Fernando Porté-Agel, 2012. "Atmospheric Turbulence Effects on Wind-Turbine Wakes: An LES Study," Energies, MDPI, vol. 5(12), pages 1-23, December.
    4. Han, Xingxing & Liu, Deyou & Xu, Chang & Shen, Wen Zhong, 2018. "Atmospheric stability and topography effects on wind turbine performance and wake properties in complex terrain," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 126(C), pages 640-651.
    5. Krohn, Søren & Damborg, Steffen, 1999. "On public attitudes towards wind power," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 954-960.
    6. Antonini, Enrico G.A. & Romero, David A. & Amon, Cristina H., 2018. "Continuous adjoint formulation for wind farm layout optimization: A 2D implementation," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 228(C), pages 2333-2345.
    7. Antonini, Enrico G.A. & Romero, David A. & Amon, Cristina H., 2020. "Optimal design of wind farms in complex terrains using computational fluid dynamics and adjoint methods," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 261(C).
    8. Leah C. Stokes & Christopher Warshaw, 2017. "Renewable energy policy design and framing influence public support in the United States," Nature Energy, Nature, vol. 2(8), pages 1-6, August.
    9. Kate Marvel & Ben Kravitz & Ken Caldeira, 2013. "Geophysical limits to global wind power," Nature Climate Change, Nature, vol. 3(2), pages 118-121, February.
    10. Lewis, Joanna I. & Wiser, Ryan H., 2007. "Fostering a renewable energy technology industry: An international comparison of wind industry policy support mechanisms," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 1844-1857, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dhoot, Aditya & Antonini, Enrico G.A. & Romero, David A. & Amon, Cristina H., 2021. "Optimizing wind farms layouts for maximum energy production using probabilistic inference: Benchmarking reveals superior computational efficiency and scalability," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 223(C).
    2. Kirchner-Bossi, Nicolas & Porté-Agel, Fernando, 2024. "Wind farm power density optimization according to the area size using a novel self-adaptive genetic algorithm," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 220(C).
    3. Cazzaro, Davide & Trivella, Alessio & Corman, Francesco & Pisinger, David, 2022. "Multi-scale optimization of the design of offshore wind farms," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 314(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Dhoot, Aditya & Antonini, Enrico G.A. & Romero, David A. & Amon, Cristina H., 2021. "Optimizing wind farms layouts for maximum energy production using probabilistic inference: Benchmarking reveals superior computational efficiency and scalability," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 223(C).
    2. Pryor, Sara C. & Barthelmie, Rebecca J., 2024. "Wind shadows impact planning of large offshore wind farms," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 359(C).
    3. Eicke, Laima & Weko, Silvia, 2022. "Does green growth foster green policies? Value chain upgrading and feedback mechanisms on renewable energy policies," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 165(C).
    4. Song, Jeonghwan & Kim, Taewan & You, Donghyun, 2023. "Particle swarm optimization of a wind farm layout with active control of turbine yaws," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 206(C), pages 738-747.
    5. Jim Kuo & Kevin Pan & Ni Li & He Shen, 2020. "Wind Farm Yaw Optimization via Random Search Algorithm," Energies, MDPI, vol. 13(4), pages 1-15, February.
    6. Feurtey, Évariste & Ilinca, Adrian & Sakout, Anas & Saucier, Carol, 2016. "Institutional factors influencing strategic decision-making in energy policy; a case study of wind energy in France and Quebec (Canada)," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 1455-1470.
    7. Dinçer, A.E. & Demir, A. & Yılmaz, K., 2024. "Multi-objective turbine allocation on a wind farm site," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 355(C).
    8. Dar, Arslan Salim & Porté-Agel, Fernando, 2022. "Wind turbine wakes on escarpments: A wind-tunnel study," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 181(C), pages 1258-1275.
    9. Hu, Weicheng & Yang, Qingshan & Chen, Hua-Peng & Guo, Kunpeng & Zhou, Tong & Liu, Min & Zhang, Jian & Yuan, Ziting, 2022. "A novel approach for wind farm micro-siting in complex terrain based on an improved genetic algorithm," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 251(C).
    10. Croonenbroeck, Carsten & Hennecke, David, 2021. "A comparison of optimizers in a unified standard for optimization on wind farm layout optimization," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 216(C).
    11. Antonini, Enrico G.A. & Romero, David A. & Amon, Cristina H., 2020. "Optimal design of wind farms in complex terrains using computational fluid dynamics and adjoint methods," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 261(C).
    12. Reddy, Sohail R., 2020. "Wind Farm Layout Optimization (WindFLO) : An advanced framework for fast wind farm analysis and optimization," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 269(C).
    13. Radünz, William Corrêa & Sakagami, Yoshiaki & Haas, Reinaldo & Petry, Adriane Prisco & Passos, Júlio César & Miqueletti, Mayara & Dias, Eduardo, 2021. "Influence of atmospheric stability on wind farm performance in complex terrain," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 282(PA).
    14. Walter, Kara A. & Thacher, Jennifer & Chermak, Janie M., 2023. "Examining willingness to pay for energy futures in a fossil and renewable energy-rich locale," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 181(C).
    15. Janel Jett & Leigh Raymond, 2021. "Issue Framing and U.S. State Energy and Climate Policy Choice," Review of Policy Research, Policy Studies Organization, vol. 38(3), pages 278-299, May.
    16. Cao, Lichao & Ge, Mingwei & Gao, Xiaoxia & Du, Bowen & Li, Baoliang & Huang, Zhi & Liu, Yongqian, 2022. "Wind farm layout optimization to minimize the wake induced turbulence effect on wind turbines," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 323(C).
    17. Tian, Runze & Kou, Peng & Zhang, Yuanhang & Mei, Mingyang & Zhang, Zhihao & Liang, Deliang, 2024. "Residual-connected physics-informed neural network for anti-noise wind field reconstruction," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 357(C).
    18. Chen, Xuejun & Yang, Yongming & Cui, Zhixin & Shen, Jun, 2019. "Vibration fault diagnosis of wind turbines based on variational mode decomposition and energy entropy," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 174(C), pages 1100-1109.
    19. Ziyu Zhang & Peng Huang & Haocheng Sun, 2020. "A Novel Analytical Wake Model with a Cosine-Shaped Velocity Deficit," Energies, MDPI, vol. 13(13), pages 1-20, June.
    20. Lema, Adrian & Ruby, Kristian, 2007. "Between fragmented authoritarianism and policy coordination: Creating a Chinese market for wind energy," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 35(7), pages 3879-3890, July.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:appene:v:281:y:2021:i:c:s0306261920314835. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.