Wind resource in Iceland

Iceland has considerable renewable energy resources. While hydropower and geothermal power have been exploited on a significant scale, less attention has been paid to wind power. In preparation for the Nordic IceWind project, this study aims to build up a quality controlled data base of wind observations, and make a preliminary map of the wind resource. The data used come from 130 automatic weather stations distributed around Iceland, and consists of wind measurements every ten minutes in the period 1999 - 2010. The operational period for the stations varies from 5 to 10 years, and in total there were 55 million observations to quality check (QC). In 80 stations more than 99% of the data passed QC. Most problems occurred during winter, especially in harsh climate mountain stations. These problems involved anemometer freezing and faults and electrostatic spikes. The wind speeds were transferred to 90 m agl using a standard power law profile. The resulting data was then averaged for extended winter (Sep-Apr) and summer (May - Aug) seasons. Furthermore, a generic production curve for wind turbines was used to estimate the annual energy production (AEP) per installed megawatt for each season at each station. These results have been interpolated to intra-station locations, thus producing a preliminary wind atlas of for Iceland, which will aid in the selection of sites for potential wind farms. Although the data base has been completed, the analysis of of the data and the production of the wind atlas is ongoing. The inclusion of topographic effects, wind profile measurements and more detailed power production modeling will be further studied within the IceWind project, as well as incorporation of wind from a reanalysis downscaled with a numerical weather prediction model (NWP).