Turbulence, a challenging problem for wind energy

Basic problems arising in the growing use of the wind energy are discussed. We mainly focus on problems which are related to the turbulent character of the wind. The meaning of large and meso-scale atmospheric turbulence for the energy production is discussed. We show for the wind turbulence on small scales how statistics with anomalous probabilities arise, which can be set into the context of wind gusts. Furthermore, we discuss a new method to extract a stochastic process from given data which enables a new and more profound statistical description of the complexity of turbulence and turbulent wind fields. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.