A long-term wind resource map was made to provide the key design data for the 2.5 GW Korean West-South Offshore Wind Project, and its reliability was validated. A one-way dynamic downscaling of the MERRA reanalysis meteorological data of the Yeongwang-Gochang offshore was carried out using WindSim, a Computational Fluid Dynamics based wind resource mapping software, to establish a 33-year time series wind resource map of 100 m x 100 m spatial resolution and 1-hour interval temporal resolution from 1979 to 2012. The simulated wind resource map was validated by comparison with wind measurement data from the HeMOSU offshore meteorological tower, the Wangdeungdo Island meteorological tower, and the Gochang transmission tower on the nearby coastline, and the uncertainty due to long-term variability was analyzed. The long-term variability of the wind power was investigated in inter-annual, monthly, and daily units while the short-term variability was examined as the pattern of the coefficient of variation in hourly units. The results showed that the inter-annual variability had a maximum wind index variance of 22.3% while the short-term variability, i.e., the annual standard deviation of the hourly average wind power, was 0.041±0.001, indicating steady variability.

In order to analyze the effect of environmental protection on wind energy dissemination quantitatively, the onshore wind resource potential is estimated using Environmental Conservation Value Assessment Map and Korea Wind Resource Map. The onshore wind resource potential of 11 GW is calculated if wind farm development is prohibited within Class 1 area of Environmental Conservation Value Assessment plus 500 m buffer area. Therefore it is worried that environmental protection would be a practical barrier of accomplishing 4,155 thousand TOE target of wind energy dissemination until 2030.

We classified wind sectors according to the wind features in South Korea. In order to get the information of wind speed and wind direction, we used and improved on the atmospheric numerical model. We made use of detailed topographical data such as terrain height data of an interval of 3 seconds and landuse data produced at ministry of environment, Republic of Korea. The result of simulated wind field was improved. We carried out the cluster analysis to classify the wind sectors using the K-means clustering. South Korea was classified as 8 wind sectors to the annual wind field.

In order to support the development of wind farms in Jejudo, a wind resource database for Jejudo has been established using a meteor-statistical analysis of KIER(Korea Institute of Energy Research) met-mast measurements and KMA(Korea Meteorological Administration) weather data. The analysis included wind statistics, tower shading, an exposure category classification using satellite images, the effect of atmospheric stability on the wind profile exponent, and a correlation matrix of wind speed to gain an understanding of the meteorological correlation between long-term weather observation stations and short-term met-mast measurements. The wind resource database for Jejudo, is to be provided as an add-on to Google EarthTM, which is expected to be utilized as a guideline for the selection of an appropriate reference site for long-term correction in the next wind farm development project.