Climatology of North Sea wind energy derived from a model hindcast for 1958-2012

The inter-annual to decadal variability can reach up to 5% from the multi-decadal mean and therefore plays an important role in wind energy; wind power estimates based on short observational time series, particularly from the late 1990s, may exhibit high biases. The up-scaling from wind speeds at a height of 10 m using conventional power laws may result in similar biases. On inter-annual to decadal time scales, synergies are not expected from the different arrays in the North Sea, i.e., a decrease in the power output of an array may not be balanced by another.