In addition to the solar radiation, wind is other atmospheric parameter which affects the production of concentrated solar plants. The defence strategies, focused on preventing wind damages in collectors, force unproductive configurations in the solar field wasting part of the available resource. This brief note aims to define an efficient approach to estimate this wasted resource considering both the wind conditions and the defence strategy. In a first step, the wasted energy is assessed on four real-life cases considering three years of wind speed, wind gust and solar radiation data. Then, these results are compared with the ones obtained from four proposed approaches designed to test the level of wind description which is required to estimate the wasted resource successfully. Results show that accurate estimations can be obtained from a simple description of the annual mean daily profile of the wind in the emplacement. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.