Comparison of hourly and daily wind speed observations for the computation of Weibull parameters and power output

In this paper we compared Weibull distributions fitted using the hourly wind speed observations measured by weather stations of the UK Meteorological Office and daily averages measured by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration in the same locations. The measurements collected over 5 years (2009-2013) have been analysed. The shape and scale parameters and the mean wind speed have been compared. Finally, we considered a 3 MW wind turbine with 100m hub height to estimate and compare the long term electricity generation using the two datasets. The results show that, using daily averages, the mean wind speed values do not significantly vary. However, its standard deviation varies substantially, which is due to the smoothing of extreme wind measurements in the daily average dataset. When performing the long term estimate of the full-load hours and the electricity generation, the results show that error margins are low when using daily averages.