In 2017–2018 NCAR partnered with NREL to perform a wind resource assessment for Alaska’s offshore regions. NREL had previously developed wind resource assessments for offshore regions of the conterminous U.S. (CONUS) and Hawai’i. This project performed the first known rigorous assessment of the offshore wind resource for Alaska, extending to 200 nautical miles from the coastline.

Figure 1. 100-m average wind speed from the 2002–2016 WRF simulation within the technical resource area. [From Fig. 14 in Doubrawa et al. (2017).]

This resource assessment was based on a 14-year WRF® simulation covering Alaska and its surrounding waters at 4-km grid spacing. The WRF dataset had previously been developed by RAL for regional climate and hydrologic applications in Alaska, and is publicly available for download (Monaghan et al. 2016, 2018). NREL team members performed the wind resource assessment based on the WRF dataset, which found a large technical wind resource at hub height (Figure 1), including in favorable areas with shallow waters close to population centers and existing transmission grids (Doubrawa et al. 2017). NCAR team members performed the validation of this WRF dataset against available surface-based and radiosonde observations (Lee et al. 2018, 2019). The WRF modeled wind speed was found to have near-zero average bias and positive skill, which provided confidence of the wind resource assessment. The results of this project can be used to identify potentially favorable regions to target with future site assessments and measurement campaigns to determine if potential future offshore wind development is viable in those locations.