NREL Wind Integration Datasets

The Wind Integration Datasets provide energy professionals with a consistent set of wind profiles for the eastern United States and the western United States. Both datasets provide ten minute time-series wind data for 2004, 2005, and 2006. This means that if you are investigating an overall good wind site but that, for example, 2004 happened to be a bad year for that site, then the time-series results for 2004 will likely reflect the poor resource during that year. Conversely, one year of data from this wind dataset might show a good wind resource due to interannual variations, yet the long-term average resource may be lower.

The Eastern Wind Dataset was originally created for the Eastern Wind Integration and Transmission Study, and the Western Wind Dataset was originally created for the Western Wind and Solar Integration Study.

These Wind Integration Datasets are intended to be used by energy professionals such as transmission planners, utility planners, project developers, and university researchers.

For the Eastern dataset, more than 1,326 simulated wind farms data points are available across the eastern United States.

For the Western dataset, more than 30,000 data points are available across the western United States.

The Eastern Dataset and the Western Dataset were created for very similar purposes and have the same period of record (1/1/2004-12/31/2006), but the data files and the methodology used to create them are not the same. See http://www.nrel.gov/electricity/transmission/about_datasets.html for further information.