| Summary: | Continued growth of wind turbine physical dimensions is examined in terms of the implications for wind speed, power and shear across the rotor plane. High-resolution simulations with the Weather Research and Forecasting model are used to generate statistics of wind speed profiles for scenarios of current and future wind turbines. The nine-month simulations, focused on the eastern Central Plains, show that the power scales broadly as expected with the increase in rotor diameter (<i>D</i>) and wind speeds at hub-height (<i>H</i>). Increasing wind turbine dimensions from current values (approximately <i>H</i> = 100 m, <i>D</i> = 100 m) to those of the new International Energy Agency reference wind turbine (<i>H</i> = 150 m, <i>D</i> = 240 m), the power across the rotor plane increases 7.1 times. The mean domain-wide wind shear exponent (<i>α</i>) decreases from 0.21 (<i>H</i> = 100 m, <i>D</i> = 100 m) to 0.19 for the largest wind turbine scenario considered (<i>H</i> = 168 m, <i>D</i> = 248 m) and the frequency of extreme positive shear (<i>α</i> > 0.2) declines from 48% to 38% of 10-min periods. Thus, deployment of larger wind turbines potentially yields considerable net benefits for both the wind resource and reductions in fatigue loading related to vertical shear.
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