The island of Gotland has played an important role in the history of wind energy in Sweden since the very beginning. In the past decade, the island reached the maximum intermittent wind power capacity that the local grid and the current connection to the mainland can safely manage without compromising the security of supply. There were plans to install a new submarine cable, but they were finally cancelled. Nevertheless, the Swedish Government has decided to start a pilot project to make Gotland the spearhead of the energy transition. Most likely, this means that a new wind power expansion will have to take place on the island. In that context, the present study aims to estimate the onshore wind power potential of Gotland based on the New European Wind Atlas released in 2019. The starting assumption is that the potential of the island is limited to the areas appointed of national interest for wind energy by the Swedish Energy Agency. Then, the wind power potential is estimated under three technological scenarios ranging from the wind turbines operating on the island to the wind turbines recently launched on the global market. The results show that Gotland has the potential to annually produce between 2.2 TWh and 2.7 TWh of additional energy from the available wind depending on the technology used. Comparisons with real production records showed that the wind speed time series from the wind atlas proved to be useful to accurately reproduce the production patterns of real wind turbines on the island when values were aggregated at a daily or higher time scale. Additionally, mean wind speed at 100 m and the parameters of the Weibull functions fitted to the wind speed distributions were mapped for the whole island. Mean wind speeds obtained from the New European Wind Atlas for the areas of national interest on Gotland were compared to the respective values from the Swedish Wind Atlas. It was found that the latter gives systematically higher values with an average difference of 0.4 m/s within the sample.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-470141 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Arteaga Ossa, Andres |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för geovetenskaper |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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