A Review on Wind Speed Extreme Values Modeling and Bayes Estimation for Wind Power Plant Design and Construction

Rapid growth of the use of wind energy calls for a more careful representation of wind speed probability distribution, both for identification and estimation purposes. In particular, a key point of the above identification and estimation aspects is representing the extreme values of wind speed probability distributions, which are of great interest both for wind energy applications and structural tower reliability analysis. The paper reviews the most adopted probability distribution models and estimation methods. In particular, for reasons which are properly discussed, attention is focused on the evaluation of an opportune "safety index" related to extreme values of wind speeds or gusts. This topic has gained increasing attention in recent years in both wind energy generation assessment and also in risk and structural reliability and safety analysis. With regard to wind energy generation, there is great sensitivity in the relationship between wind speed extreme upper quantiles and the corresponding wind energy quantiles. Concerning the risk and reliability analysis of structures, extreme wind speed value characterization is useful for a proper understanding of the destructive wind forces that may affect structural tower reliability analysis and, consequently, the proper choice of the cut off wind speed value; therefore, the above two kinds of analyses are somewhat related to each other. The focus is on the applications of the Bayesian inference technique for estimating the above safety index due to its effectiveness and usefulness.