[RE-wrenches] Site Evaluation for a Wind Turbine Farm

[Kurt Albershardt]

On 6/19/09 10:13 AM, Peter Parrish wrote:
> I have been asked by one of my students, who is also a renewable energy
> developer, about site evaluation for wind. I told him that he needs to move
> beyond downloading "maps" showing the m/s contours at some altitude (at a
> fairly coarse scale), and get a small turbine on the actual site and take
> some actual data (at the appropriate height).
>    

Most wind power developers have their own rigs for this sort of thing, 
though you really want several years of data from multiple anemometers 
on-site (not impractical given the project timelines I have seen 
associated with large-scale wind farms.)

AWS TrueWind does fairly sophisticated modeling that has been used by a 
number of governmental entities and wind developers.  Check out 
http://navigator.awstruewind.com/