Vaisala has performed an extensive validation, confirming the accuracy of its energy assessment methodology. The results of this assessment validation process have revealed that, on average, the wind projects in the validation study performed within 0.1% of Vaisala's pre-construction estimates during the years analysed.
This statistic is based on a comprehensive analysis of 30 operational wind farms, totalling 127 wind farm years. Of the years encompassed by the study, 90% were between 2010 and 2015, providing a significant sample size while still ensuring that projects' measurement techniques were up to modern standards. The result confirms that Vaisala's calculations are calibrated and in line with P50 wind energy estimates. While Vaisala's approach to energy assessment follows many standard best practices familiar to the industry, it has also introduced several new innovations. For example, Vaisala pioneered the broad integration of NWP (numerical weather prediction) models into the wind resource assessment process and works with ensembles of all global reanalysis datasets to more accurately characterise the impacts of climate and weather at a project. The company also relies on full time series data rather than averaged quantities to more realistically show the influence of unusual weather patterns. In addition, it has developed a new uncertainty model known as the Energy Risk Framework, which captures risk at every step in the assessment process, incorporating complex dependencies ignored in classical approaches.
