Assessing Wind Energy Resources in the New Mega-City NEOM

• Activity Number: 64 - Modeling Uncertainty in Energy Systems
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, July 28, 2019 : 4:00 PM to 5:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics and the Environment
• Author(s): Marc Genton*
• Companies: King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
• Keywords: Wind energy; space-time; stochastic generator; extremes; high-resolutions; WRF

Abstract

Saudi Arabia has been seeking to reduce its dependence on oil by diversifying its energy portfolio. In particular, the project for the new mega-city NEOM, located in Northwestern Saudi Arabia, is planning to build vast fields of wind turbines to harness wind power, serving as the only energy resource other than solar power. Using a unique Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) dataset, we provide a high-resolution wind energy assessment for NEOM as well as a study of extreme winds that can potentially disrupt wind turbine operations. We use spatio-temporal stochastic generators and models for spatial extremes in our analysis.