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Can anyone point me to logs of energy generated by a wind farm/turbine vs. wind speed, over a year or two? 10% accuracy would be plenty. Data for flat land, not offshore, would be good, south Germany ideal.

(By "energy" I mean Megawatt-hours (MWh) delivered to the power grid.)

Added 3 Feb: I should have split the question into

  • turbine -> power: answered
  • wind speed data: no opensource so far for Germany. However average x Weibull seems to be good enough.

(What I wanted to do is estimate, back-of-the-envelope:
Bavaria has a long string of mountains on the border to Austria.
How much more efficient are wind turbines there than in the plains around Munich ?)

A map intended to show laypersons that windfarms make more sense where there's more wind (added in 2022) -- enter image description here

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The wind power production data will likely be proprietary because of energy trading (production companies don't want to freely announce how profitable they are.)

There is an online tool to calculate power production for all sorts of turbine types. You can choose a power curve related to a specific turbine type, or manually set one.

enter image description here

With the power calculator you can estimate the power production for a site for different turbine types.

A turbine availabiliy of 100% is assumed (no losses due to down time, icing, transformer losses, park effects etc.).

No guarantees can be given for the obtained results.

enter image description here

Another option would be to find research data for specific turbines, but that isn't real production data.

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Here are some datasets that might be of additional interest:

http://www.nrel.gov/electricity/transmission/eastern_wind_methodology.html

Eastern Wind Dataset The Eastern Wind Dataset contains modeled wind farm data points for the eastern United States for 2004, 2005, and 2006. It is intended for use by energy professionals such as transmission planners, utility planners, project developers, and university researchers who perform wind integration studies and estimate power production from hypothetical wind plants.

http://www.nrel.gov/electricity/transmission/western_wind_dataset.html

The wind plant power output dataset is several hundred gigabytes. In addition to this dataset, 3TIER produced the gridded raw wind speed dataset, which is tens of terabytes. This raw wind speed output dataset has not been smoothed, nor Model Output Statistics corrected. Read about the details of dataset processing in this conference paper. Making this raw wind speed dataset public would be an enormous undertaking and is beyond the scope of this project.

3Tier has a paid version of wind speed time series data for across the globe:

http://www.3tier.com/en/package_detail/wind-time-series-and-prospecting-tools/

The 3TIER Wind Time Series and Prospecting Tools allow you to explore wind behavior and long-term variability across the globe at a flat low price. Now you can quickly and easily prioritize sites and better understand the uncertainty of your long-term corrections – a critical factor when evaluating project locations.

CSIRO has historic and predicted wind speed data based on climate models. It includes Germany:

http://www.marine.csiro.au/marq/edd_search.Browse_Citation?txtSession=8026

Abstract : The CSIRO Dawn-2100 archive contains datasets for atmospheric, land and oceanographic variables for the approximate period 1850 - 2100 (dependent on model). These have been created through the concatenation of 20th century (20C3M) and other scenario (currently SRESA1B or SRESA2) data from a number of the 25 differant global climate models (GCM) from various countries. The SRESA2_cal_windsp dataset in particular contains the variable windspeed (windsp) which has been calculated from GCM outputs of eastward wind near surface (uas) and northward wind near surface (vas) under the scenario SRESA2 emissions 2001 to 2100. These variables have also been further analysed to give monthly, seasonal and annual trend data, calculated from a monthly timeseries referenced to the area-weighted mean global warming values. Data for variables is available in 12 month, annual and 4 seasons(DJF, MAM,JJA,SON) format with 27 files totaling 2.95 GB as Netcdf files. Available for internal use and analysis by CSIRO staff on the HPSC cherax.

The European Environmental Agency has a published report with aggregated data on wind energy potential in Europe:

https://www.energy.eu/publications/a07.pdf

Europe's onshore and offshore wind energy potential An assessment of environmental and economic constraints

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  • Thanks. CSIRO data is "Available for internal use". The energy.eu report (2009, 90p) is a good intro to complex factors / a report and estimation industry.
    – denis
    Commented Feb 3, 2015 at 15:17
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(the question is old but maybe these more updated links can be helpful to people reading the question)

Here you can find some data related with renewable energy:

irena.masdar.ac.ae/

If you want modelled time series (data from global meteorological models) you can get info from reanalyses projects. The open and most up-to-date in horizontal and time resolution would be the following ones:

http://www.ecmwf.int/en/research/climate-reanalysis/era-interim http://cfs.ncep.noaa.gov/cfsr/ https://gmao.gsfc.nasa.gov/reanalysis/MERRA-2/

From them you can obtain a wind distribution to use with a power curve.

Also, if you need real data you can try the NCDC dataset:

https://gis.ncdc.noaa.gov/maps/ncei/cdo/hourly

Again, from them you can obtain a wind distribution to use with a power curve.

Last but not least, you can access measurement records from the DWD (German met service) from:

http://www.dwd.de/EN/ourservices/cdcftp/cdcftp.html

Side note: It is not a so easy relation between wind speed <-> Power production. You need to define the suitability of the wind turbine generator to the site, the hub height, the construction costs, the Operation and Maintenance costs, other environmental variables that can affect to the normal operation of the site,...

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The Engie Group has just published operational data of one of its wind farms under the Open License 2.0 of Etalab. See here: https://opendata-renewables.engie.com/pages/home/

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The Swiss Federal Office of Energy seperately publishes data and visualizations about wind and wind turbines.

map with wind energy plants

Wind Speed

You can use the Wind Atlas (details). At first look, I don't know how to extract the data from the visualization.

map with wind speeds

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