Bias Corrected HRRR Wind Resource Data for Grid Integration Applications

Many weather years of high-quality wind data are widely accepted in the grid integration community to be important for studying wind energy technical potential, energy system operations, and grid resilience.

NREL makes high-quality wind and solar resource data available. NREL's Grid-Atmosphere workshop (March 2024) identified NREL National Solar Radiation Database as widely used in grid integration modeling, but there is less agreement on gold standard wind datasets. One important factor identified by ESIG's 2023 report "Weather Dataset Needs for Planning and Analyzing Modern Power Systems" for gold standard wind data is regular updates.

To address the need for regular updates, NREL's team can now process all currently available and regularly updated High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) outputs. HRRR is an hourly-updated operational forecast product produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (Dowell et al., 2022).

One barrier to NREL using HRRR is consistency with NREL's existing wind datasets (e.g. WIND Toolkit, "WTK") across weather years. To address this barrier, we show that the HRRR can be interpolated and bias-corrected to be consistent with NREL's existing datasets. We call the new dataset BC-HRRR (bias-corrected HRRR). As with historical datasets like WTK, BC-HRRR is intended for use in grid integration modeling (e.g., capacity expansion, production cost, and resource adequacy modeling). Similar to the WTK, BC-HRRR includes wind speed, direction, temperature, and humidity data across the contiguous United States (both onshore and offshore) at several hub heights.

BC-HRRR's (2015-present) consistency with WTK (2007-2013) allows NREL to extend internal grid integration tooling to 15+ weather years of wind data with low-overhead extensibility to future years as they occur and are made available by NOAA.