Confident wind farm site evaluations

The Met Office Virtual Met Mast™ can add to your due diligence process for wind investment. Utilising the most innovative science it offers clear, cost-effective and reliable site analyses to help you make informed and confident decisions for your wind farm investments.

Virtual Met Mast™ can uniquely perform accurate primary site evaluations in the initial stages of development - without the need for on-site data - saving you time and money. It can also be used as part of a portfolio evaluation.

Benefits

• Increases certainty of wind resource assessments for specific sites.
• Provides detailed and accurate information for complex onshore terrain and offshore sites.
• Saves you time and money by delaying investments in real met masts until needed.
• Enables quicker decision-making as you can receive wind resource estimates within days rather than months.
• Helps optimise your wind farm planning and performance later in the development cycle, as on-site monitored data becomes available.

Assessments available across the UK and Europe

Your Virtual Met Mast™ report will contain detailed wind climatology for each site, including:

• annual and monthly mean wind speed at agreed hub height, with uncertainty bands;

• annual and monthly wind rose and frequency table showing speed and direction;

• wind speed Weibull distributions for all and 30° wind sector;

• P50/90 values;
• probability of exceeding wind speed threshold, by month.

Sample report of Virtual Met Mast™ (PDF, 1 MB)

Testing has demonstrated that the Met Office Virtual Met Mast™ regularly provides mean wind speed estimates within five per cent (around 0.3 metres per second) of monitored data at existing wind farm sites.

The Virtual Met Mast™ time series can also be used to extend the observations obtained from a real met mast by using a 'Model, Measure, Correlate, Predict' approach, as an alternative to using a nearby conventional wind observing site, often with improved correlations.

For more information and for a copy of a verification report please contact our Customer Centre or use our contact form.

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