Wind power energy in Southern Brazil: Evaluation using a mesoscale meteorological model

The Rio Grande do Sul state, in Southern Brazil, is one of the most favorable regions for wind energy exploitation. Therefore, we evaluate mesoscale model's short term (several days) high resolution simulations, analyzing the potential wind power at two levels, 50 and 150 m. We compare the results with a wind atlas study from the Brazilian Wind Energy Association. We concluded that the mesoscale model produces results similar to those of the atlas, and it can be used both to characterize the long term wind energy production and to estimate the short term extreme variations