Evaluation of Lebanon’s Offshore-Wind-Energy Potential

Abstract

The only regional evaluation of Lebanese wind-energy potential (National Wind Atlas) dates back to 2011 and was carried out by a United Nations agency. In this work, data from the most recent reanalysis (ERA5) developed at the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF), corresponding to the 2010–2017 period, were used to evaluate Lebanese offshore-wind-energy potential. In the present study, wind power density associated to a SIEMENS 154/6 turbine was calculated with a horizontal resolution of 31 km and 1 hour time steps. This work incorporated the impact of air density changes into the calculations due to the seasonal evolution of pressure, temperature, and humidity. Observed average offshore air density ρ 0 was 1.19 kg / m 3 for the 2010–2017 period, but if instead of ρ 0 , hourly ρ values were used, seasonal oscillations of wind power density ( W P D ) represented differences in percentage terms ranging from −4% in summer to +3% in winter. ERA5 provides hourly wind, temperature, pressure, and dew-point temperature values that allowed us to calculate the hourly evolution of air density during this period and could also be used to accurately evaluate wind power density off the Lebanese coast. There was a significant gradient in wind power density along the shore, with the northern coastal area exhibiting the highest potential and reaching winter values of around 400 W / m 2 . Finally, this study suggests that the initial results provided by the National Wind Atlas overestimated the true offshore-wind-energy potential, thus highlighting the suitability of ERA5 as an accurate tool for similar tasks globally.

Towards global validation of wind power simulations: A multi-country assessment of wind power simulation from MERRA-2 and ERA-5 reanalyses bias-corrected with the global wind atlas

“…Also correlations between wind power generation in European countries [13], extreme events in Britain [14], or the impacts of uncertainty factors [15] and ageing [16] in wind power simulation were studied. With ERA5 global [16] and Lebanese [17] offshore wind power potential, as well as electricity demand and renewable generation in Europe [18] and West Africa [19] were estimated. While global reanalysis data sets offer the advantage of conducting multi-country or global analyses without the need for country or regionspecific climate data sources, they also come with their drawbacks.…”

Three-Parameter Weibull for Offshore Wind Speed Distribution in Malaysia

“…ERA5, for instance, has been used to evaluate the potential for wind energy in various offshore locations around the world. These locations include northeastern Scotland [27], Lebanon [28], Qatar [29], south and southeastern Brazil [30], the Mediterranean Sea [31], the Caspian Sea [32], and the Indian Sea [33], as well as globally [34]. The correlation of ERA5 with the observed data is up to 0.90, as presented by [18][19][20].…”

Wind and Solar Energy Generation Potential Features in the Extreme Northern Amazon Using Reanalysis Data

“…The ERA5 reanalysis dataset is a valuable tool for renewable energy studies, providing comprehensive and reliable meteorological data that can be used to assess the potential of renewable energy sources, and is widely utilized by the scientific community [6,[40][41][42][43][44].…”

“…Air density is only provided by ERA5 over the oceans; therefore, it needed to be calculated. As exemplified by [44], the density of moist air is computed from the averages of the expression corresponding to dry air if the virtual temperature (t v ) is used instead of the actual temperature ( t2m) in the equation for the state of dry air. The density of moist air is given by the following equation [47]:…”