Czech wind power potential assessment based on Austrian/Danish site characteristics

Abstract

Wind power is a promising technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the electricity sector. However, besides climatic limitations such as prevalent wind speeds, further parameters like population density, land use, and protected areas restrict the available sites. Typically, in the assessments of wind power potential, the restrictions are normatively chosen based on legal, technical, or other criteria. We assess in contrast wind power expansion in the Czech Republic considering wind power site characteristics observed in Austria and Denmark. For this purpose, we use spatially highly resolved data on wind turbine deployment in Austria and Denmark and join it with high quality input data from the LUISA terrestrial modelling platform, and the IRENA Global Wind Atlas. In preliminary calculations, we identified a maximum potential area of 769 km2 in the Austrian scenario and 519 km2 in the Danish scenario for the Czech Republic which translates to 3,685 MW respectively 913 MW of installed capacity. The results show, that the calculated wind power potential only partly meets the capacities as required by recent studies on the decarbonization of the electricity sector. This illustrates the existing challenge of a large-scale installation of onshore wind power turbines in densely populated European areas. A sensitivity analysis examined the impact of the single parameters in a maximum and minimum scenario. As expected, the availability was mainly determined by wind speed, the three land use forms urban areas, agriculture and forests, as well as the population density close to the wind power sites. Protected areas do not seem to significantly limit the potential areas for wind power expansion. The data sets generated in this study can be used in further research to identify and address land use conflicts arising from the expansion of renewable energies.