SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “wind energy development”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

SourceResearch connectionFrom yearThrough year

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 37 records · Page 2

All sources NASA NTRS DOE OSTI

DOE OSTI2022

AIS-based characterization of navigation conflicts along the US Atlantic Coast prior to development of wind energy

This study characterizes navigation conflicts in a region with a large traffic volume along the US Atlantic Coast, utilizing Automated Identification System (AIS) data for 2010. The region includes areas proposed for wind energy development. The characterization could be useful in evaluating the effect of offshore wind areas on navigation conflicts. The study processes the AIS data to provide pairwise comparisons of vessel interactions (encounters and near-misses) as they occurred. Using the vessel encounter data, analyses are made using a ‘blind’ vessel assumption to evaluate the potential for both near-misses and collisions. Then statistical analyses are made to estimate the point values and uncertainty for each type of encounter (crossing, head-on, overtaking). Examination of the frequency/number of collisions from actual observations is made. The examination of actual near-misses, potential near-misses, and potential collisions provides comparable results in the number of near-misses and collisions. The potential near-miss analyses include an examination of the timing of responses made by vessels to prevent near-misses. This informed the statistical analysis but may also have utility in the simulation of navigation conflicts.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

DOE OSTI2024

Wind Energy Instrumentation Development Roadmap

The current instrumentation for observing the complex flow fields in and around wind plants struggles to match the fidelity of existing simulation tools. As a result, these measurement limitations create a hurdle for validating and assessing the quality of the wind plant numerical models. This roadmap for instrumentation development recommendations was created to offer guidance on narrowing the gap between measurement and simulation fidelity. A process was established to identify where gaps in instrumentation exist for wind energy test campaigns by analyzing the capabilities of instrumentation for capturing the various important phenomena at the necessary resolution for both the science goal and validation objectives. To this end, a multi-disciplinary team of experts on instrumentation, wind energy, and atmospheric science was assembled to identify these significant instrumentation needs. A recommendation for instrumentation to be developed is provided, and the framework developed through this process is expected to be useful to the design of future test campaigns. The mapping tools developed for this process will be distributed as part of a future International Energy Agency Wind Technology Collaboration Program task on instrumentation development.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2025

Validating Greater Sage-Grouse Individual-based Model (IBM) Tool (Final Report)

The project focused on validating the previously developed Greater Sage-Grouse Individual-based Model (GrSG IBM; LaGory et al. 2012, 2021). The objective was to transform this predictive, spatially and temporally explicit model into a portable resource to assist siting/resource managers in proactively assessing the cumulative impacts of wind energy development on the greater sage-grouse. Utilizing a bottom-up, individual-based approach, the GrSG IBM accounts for landscape context and species behavior, aiming to reduce uncertainty in estimating development impacts and support ecologically mindful land-based wind energy development. The validation effort covered approximately 6,540 km 2 near the Seven Mile Hill Wind Project in Wyoming. The GrSG IBM tool, built on the NetLogo platform (Tisue and Wilensky 2004), was executed over a 50-year period, with the analysis focusing on years following a 10-year initialization phase. Key results demonstrated the tool’s biological soundness across five key biological metrics: non-chick age class distribution (older than 10 weeks), adult sex ratio, life expectancy, population size, and overall population growth. For instance, the tool estimated that 58.6% of the non-chick population was reproductively immature, while the reference ranges from 51.4% to 57.8% (Patterson 1952, Rogers 1964). Experts confirmed the tool’s estimate was within a reasonable range for the species. The tool estimated average life expectancy of 1.43 years, while the reference ranges from 0.9 years to 1.1 years (Ammann 1957, Hamerstrom 1949). Experts also supported the model’s life-expectancy estimate as ecologically sound for the species in the study area. In terms of population change, the model estimated an annual shift between a 0.6% decline and a 1.0% increase over 50 years. While the reference suggests 2.9% annual decline in range-wide populations (Cortes et al. 2023), that includes many at-risk populations in South Dakota and Washington, for example. Our study area—in the northeastern part of Carbon County and western-edge of Albany County, Wyoming—is one of the remaining greater sage-grouse habitats supporting some of the most stable populations. Experts confirmed that the range of the annual population change spanning from a 0.6% decline to a 1.0% increase estimated by the tool was reasonable for our study area for this reason and confirmed that aligned with population estimates from existing studies on the greater sage-grouse and wind energy development in the study area (LeBeau et al. 2017a, Smith et al. 2024). Furthermore, the project showed that temporally explicit biological metrics generated by the GrSG IBM tool can complement the USGS’ Prioritizing Restoration of Sagebrush Ecosystems Tool (PReSET; Duchardt et al. 2021) by incorporating habitat restoration strategies into seasonal habitat suitability models to visualize population responses over time.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2021

Land-Based Wind Energy Siting: A Foundational and Technical Resource

This land-based wind energy siting resource was created by the U.S. Department of Energy Wind Energy Technologies Office’s WINDExchange initiative and presents foundational information about land-based utility-scale wind energy that local decision makers can use when making community decisions about wind energy development. Consolidated, accessible, and easy to understand, this information resource focuses on land-based wind energy from the community perspective and examines siting-related impacts and mitigation strategies. Other impacts and strategies exist, such as those related to economics, climate, health, water, emissions, and waste; however, they are not covered in this resource. For more information on economic considerations, see the “Land-Based Wind: Economic Development Guide” and “Advancing the Growth of the U.S. Wind Industry: Federal Incentives, Funding, and Partnership Opportunities.” The intended audience for this guide is county-level decision officials, as they are often responsible for approving both wind energy ordinances and applicable permits needed for wind energy development. This guide may also provide relevant information to decision makers from other government jurisdictions and interested community members.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2024

Challenges and Opportunities for Floating Offshore Wind Energy in Ultradeep Waters of the Central Atlantic

This study, funded under an interagency agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), is intended to provide BOEM with key information to inform their decision making about current and future leasing in the Central Atlantic region of the United States. The report will also benefit state governments, developers, research institutions, and the public which are seeking technical and market-based information about the unique aspects of the offshore wind energy development along the outer continental shelf of the Central Atlantic region of the United States. The study provides a broad top-level assessment of the key challenges and opportunities that are unique to offshore wind energy development in the Central Atlantic region. It focuses on BOEM's Central-Atlantic region Call areas. The research is based on the most current technology, deployment, and stakeholder information available to NREL. The topics include assessments of the physical environment, current leasing status and major stakeholder issues, state and federal energy policy, an assessment of future leasing requirements based on state targets, status and limitations of the technology, and supply chain status. The primary intent is to inform the readers about the prospects for deploying offshore wind in the designated deep water Call areas, E and F, identified by BOEM. The report makes recommendations regarding development in these regions.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

DOE OSTI2023

Observed impacts of large wind farms on grassland carbon cycling

Deployment of wind energy is an essential renewable energy source that mitigates climate change and reduces air pollution. Over the last several decades, wind energy development has increased worldwide, expanding from ~20 to ~900 GW (gigawatt) during 2001-2022. Nonetheless, researchers have identified unintended consequences of wind energy on microclimate via turbine-altered surface-atmosphere exchanges of energy, momentum, mass, and trace gases. Based on multi-source observations and models, researchers also have drawn some conclusions that wind farms could warm the land surface, especially at night, at regional and continental scales. Consequently, altered microclimates at wind farms may affect vegetation productivity and carbon sequestration, two critically important ecosystem services related to carbon dynamics; however, such potential impacts and driving mechanisms remain poorly understood. Wind energy deployment is increasing globally to meet carbon neutrality goals, with upscaling of onshore wind power capacity projected to grow from 542 GW in 2018 to 1787 and 5044 GW by 2030 and 2050, respectively. Furthermore, increased demand for wind energy deployment may lead to much larger wind farms in open, expansive landscapes. In turn, a large array of geographically clustered wind turbines could collectively modify local microclimate and amplify turbine-atmosphere interactions, which, if large enough, may produce detectable impacts on ecosystem dynamics. Thus, identifying and quantifying the potential impacts of wind farms on carbon-related ecosystem services may facilitate sustainable wind energy development globally.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2024

Regulations for Bat Protection in Mexico's Wind Farms

Wind energy development has expanded the fastest globally among all renewable sources during the last 20 years. However, wind farms have documented adverse impacts on bats, including mortality from collisions with turbine blades and disruptions to habitat and behavior. As the world's sixth most attractive economy for renewables, with 70 operating wind farms, Mexico and its bats now face escalating threats from the country's burgeoning wind industry. Despite this rapid growth, few studies have analyzed Mexico's regulatory framework to prevent, evaluate, and mitigate wind farm effects on bats. In this study, we reviewed Mexican laws and treaties that facilitate wind farm permitting, construction, operation, and decommissioning, and searched for guidelines that specifically address bat conservation. We found eight international pacts that promote wind power adoption along with three relevant articles in Mexico's Constitution. The General Law of Ecological Balance and Environmental Protection proved most pertinent for impact management. Supplementary guidelines from the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources offer general strategies for evaluating wind farm impacts on bats, but adherence remains voluntary. Given expanding wind power investments across Mexico, we highlight the need for more stringent national standards that require preventative and corrective measures to protect bat populations. Tighter legislation and enforcement offer pathways toward environmentally sustainable wind energy development in Mexico.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2021

SSRS (Stochastic Soaring Raptor Simulator)

SSRS (Stochastic Soaring Raptor Simulator) is a generalizable, probabilistic, and predictive tool for wind energy developers, ecologists, wildlife managers and industry consultants to estimate the potential for soaring raptors to interact with operating wind turbines, without the need for site-specific data collection. Rapid expansion of wind energy development across the world has exposed the risk of turbine collisions for birds and bats. The risk to obligate soaring raptors such as golden eagles is of particular concern due to their small population and influence on ecological balance. Golden eagles rely heavily on updrafts to subsidize their flight, putting them in direct conflict with operational wind turbines that utilize the same wind resource. Understanding the behavior of soaring raptors with varying atmospheric conditions is crucial for predicting and mitigating the risk of turbine collision. This software contains a predictive movement model that simulates individual flight paths of golden eagles during updraft-subsidized long-distance flight, including migration. For a given set of atmospheric conditions, the model simulates thousands of eagles at turbine-scale spatial resolution (50m) to produce a relative presence density map. The simulated eagles rely on updrafts to pursue uninterrupted directional flight with minimal energy expenditure, following fluid-flow principles. The simulator includes a stochastic model of eagle behavior and a systematic method of accounting for spatiotemporal variations in atmospheric conditions. This framework only requires publicly available atmospheric data to estimate orographic and thermal updrafts, ensuring general usability.

Sandhu, Rimple↗

DOE OSTI2023

Assessment of Offshore Wind Energy Opportunities and Challenges in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico

This report identifies and discusses opportunities and challenges for offshore wind energy development in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM). The results indicate that offshore wind energy has the potential to be a viable clean energy option to help the region meet the U.S. goals to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. Many technical challenges are discussed but most can be resolved with engineering solutions that are available to the industry.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2020

Estimating Bat Fatality at a Texas Wind Energy Facility: Implications Transcending the United States-Mexico Border

Wind energy development causes bat fatalities. Despite emphasis on understanding and reducing these impacts, few data are available for the southwest region of the United States and northern Mexico. We monitored bat fatalities for a full year (March 2017–March 2018) at a wind energy facility in south Texas near the United States–Mexico border. We established search plots of 100-m radius at eight randomly selected turbines (of 255) and searched the roads and pads at an additional 92 turbines. We conducted weekly searches from spring through fall and bimonthly during winter. We used GenEst (Generalized Mortality Estimator) to estimate bat fatalities corrected for searcher efficiency, carcass removal, and density-weighted proportion of area searched. We found 205 bats during standardized searches, the majority of which were Brazilian free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis, 76%). The corrected fatality estimates were 16 bats/megawatt/year (95% confidence interval [CI]: 12 – 30 bats/megawatt/year) across all species. Species composition at our site is similar to that of northern Mexico, an area of expanding wind energy development with no published studies.

49 EE - Wind and Water Power Program - Wind (EE-4W↗

DOE OSTI2022

Understanding Costs Associated with Wind Energy Opposition and Stakeholder Engagement

Wind energy social science research historically focused on the social acceptance of wind energy development. Research in this field is robust, and scholars have identified drivers influencing attitudes and acceptance. The criteria defining the opposition of wind energy, and their costs, although related, are less well understood. This gap in research includes the costs of delayed and failed projects to communities and developers. The International Energy Agency (IEA) Wind Task 28 - The Social Science of Wind Energy Acceptance outlined a work package to help answer that question. The first deliverable for IEA Wind Task 28, Work Package 2, was an annotated bibliography that identified key pieces of literature that quantify the costs of opposition to wind projects. Although there is a robust wind social acceptance literature, our efforts highlighted that there has been little research directly quantifying the cost of opposition, engagement, delays, and failures. To directly summarize the appropriate literature and provide context for potential future work, the literature review ranged from directly relevant articles to works providing context and valuable information for our research objective in the future. This associated deliverable, a briefing document summarizing the outcomes of our literature search, is meant to guide future research on opposition to wind energy for IEA Task 28 and beyond.

opposition↗

DOE OSTI2022

Stochastic agent-based model for predicting turbine-scale raptor movements during updraft-subsidized directional flights

Rapid expansion of wind energy development across the world has highlighted the need to better understand turbine-caused avian mortality. The risk to golden eagles (Aquila chrysaetos) is of particular concern due to their small population size and conservation status. Golden eagles subsidize their flight in part by soaring in orographic updrafts, which can place them in conflict with wind turbines utilizing the same low-altitude wind resource. Understanding the behavior of soaring raptors in varying atmospheric conditions can therefore be relevant to predicting and mitigating their risk of collision. We present a predictive movement model that simulates individual paths of golden eagles during directional flight (such as migration) that is subsidized by orographic updraft. We modeled eagles in a 50 km by 50 km study area in Wyoming containing three wind power plants with documented golden eagle collisions with turbines. The movement model is applicable to any region where ground elevation is known at turbine scale (50 m) and wind conditions are known at facility scale (3 km). For a given set of atmospheric conditions, the model simulates movements of thousands of orographic soaring eagles to produce a density map quantifying the relative probability of eagle presence. We validated the simulated tracks with GPS telemetry data showing four directional tracks made by golden eagles transiting through the area in 2019 and 2020. For each eagle track, validation was performed using the ratio of the model-simulated eagle presence likelihood with uniform eagle presence and the presence computed using directed random-walk movements. We found that the predictive performance of the model was significantly better (likelihood ratio 1) for low-altitude movements than high-altitude movements that can involve thermal-soaring. We employed the model to produce seasonal presence maps for migrating golden eagles. We found significant turbine-level variations in eagle presence between northerly and southerly migration routes through the study area. Overall, the proposed model offers a generalizable, probabilistic, and predictive tool to assist wind energy developers, ecologists, wildlife managers, and industry consultants in estimating the potential for conflict between soaring birds and wind turbines, thereby reducing the need for site-specific data on golden eagle movements.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2024

Wind Energy Instrumentation Development Roadmap

The instrumentation development roadmap provides a guide on which measurements, and instruments, are important for future field campaigns to meet both the science objects and validation plans for their successful execution. The roadmap ensures the measurements are of sufficient type and resolution to meet science objectives and validation needs essential to the campaigns. The roadmap includes measurement categories ranging from instruments that need to be created to existing instruments essential to the field campaigns. The creation of the instrumentation development roadmap builds upon the previous Atmospheric to Electrons (A2e) validation work and formation of the American WAKE experimeNt (AWAKEN) science objectives.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2024

Assessing Impacts of Waves on Hub-Height Winds off the U.S. West Coast Using Lidar Buoys and Coupled Modeling Approaches

Given the importance of offshore wind energy development to the U.S. clean energy targets, it is vital to be able to characterize the wind resource in that environment accurately. Toward that end, two Bureau of Ocean Energy Management buoys equipped with Doppler lidar are being maintained by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on behalf of the Department of Energy and deployed to regions of potential offshore wind development. In addition to standard meteorological and oceanographic measurements, the buoys document the wind profile between about 40 m and 250 m above the sea surface through Doppler lidar retrievals. After a multiyear deployment of two buoys along the U.S. East Coast, the buoys were redeployed to the U.S. West coast from 2020 – 2022 to locations near the Humboldt and Morro Bay lease areas. The buoys provide nearly continuous, multiyear datasets that can be used to evaluate predictions of hub-height (~100 m) wind speed for standard atmospheric models in the region. In the absence of measurements at the study site, offshore wind developers rely on model-based data to assess site conditions. Potential sources of model error in this environment include under-resolution or misrepresentation of coastal topographically forced flows, marine boundary layer dynamics and the evolution of their associated cloud and turbulence fields, the role of upwelling and other currents on surface heat fluxes into the boundary layer, and the impact of wave fields on surface momentum fluxes and thus the wind speed profile. In particular, most predictive models of wind speed do not predict wave fields at all, relying on parameterizations to represent their effects. In thus study, we focus on evaluating the role of wind / wave interactions on modeled hub-height wind speed and error by using the Coupled Ocean–Atmosphere–Wave–Sediment–Transport Modeling System to capture two-way interactions between an atmospheric model (Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF)) and a wave model (WAVEWATCHIII (WW3)) and compare to both stand-alone WRF and one-way coupled WRF / WW3 configurations. Our approach is similar to that used in Gaudet et al. (2022) to evaluate wind / wave coupling over the U.S. East Coast, but applied to the very different environment of the U.S. West Coast. We show examples for two cases, a cold-season frontal case and a warm-season low-level jet case. We find that wind / wave coupling makes little impact on model error for these cases at the location of the lidar buoys, for which other misrepresentations of model physics seems to be responsible for model-observation discrepancies. However, domain-wide evaluations, which also make use of the National Buoy Data Center network, show that a two-way coupling approach is less prone to systematic errors in the hub-height wind field than the one-way coupled approach. WRF resolution of kilometer-scale or less is needed to properly capture the sharp wind speed gradients that can be found along the coastline, and WW3 simulations driven by the downscaled WRF produce better bulk and spectral wave fields when compared to observations. Implications of the results for wind resource characterization are then discussed.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2024

Atlantic Offshore Wind Transmission Study

The Atlantic Offshore Wind Transmission Study (AOSWTS) is part of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) efforts to understand and facilitate the transmission of electricity from wind in the Atlantic Ocean. It was informed by the Atlantic Offshore Wind Transmission Literature Review and Gaps Analysis (Bothwell et al. 2021) and the convening workshops hosted in 2022-2023 by DOE and the U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. The study results help to inform An Action Plan for Offshore Wind Transmission Development in the U.S. Atlantic Region (Baker et al. 2023). DOE's Wind Energy Technologies Office funded AOSWTS. The AOSWTS identifies and evaluates pathways to enable offshore wind energy deployment in the Atlantic Ocean through coordinated offshore transmission solutions in the near term (by 2030) and long term (by 2050). The study fills gaps in prior analyses by providing a multiregional planning perspective that evaluates offshore wind generation development with transmission planning. It incorporates environmental, ocean co-use, and other siting considerations into defining potential offshore transmission routes. The study also compares different multiregional offshore transmission topologies and their associated costs (using potential cable routes) and benefits (in terms of production cost savings and enhanced resource adequacy). In addition, the AOSWTS analyzes reliability impacts from a multiregional perspective. The study provides guidance for policymakers and transmission stakeholders on possible outcomes resulting from a proactive, coordinated, and interregional approach to transmission planning for offshore wind energy development in the Atlantic. While this study presents possibilities, additional work following system operator methods and procedures can help build on this analysis.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2024

Atlantic Offshore Wind Transmission Study: Executive Summary

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2022

Understanding Low Level Jets in the US Atlantic Offshore

Low level jets (LLJs) in the atmosphere exhibit a local windspeed maximum in the boundary layer, with positive shear beneath the jet and negative shear above the jet. Wind turbines tend to experience increased loads with varying wake recovery characteristics in the presence of an LLJ, therefore understanding the mechanism and impact of LLJs is crucial to wind energy development. The US Mid-Atlantic offshore region is a huge potential wind energy resource, yet LLJs in this area are poorly understood. In particular, the coastal offshore environment does not exhibit the same diurnal cycle that leads to strong LLJs in the well-characterized Great Plains region. In this study, we use the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) plus lidar buoy data to identify case studies for LLJ events in 2020 in the New York Bight. A reduced order model is presented to explain the onset of these events based on the competing effects of baroclinicity and eddy diffusivity. Finally, using the macro-scale WRF, we drive a micro-scale large eddy simulation (LES) to generate a more detailed characterization of the Marine Boundary Layer during an LLJ. Gaining a better understanding of LLJs and their impacts on offshore wind in the mid-Atlantic is crucial for a transition toward renewable energy.

atmospheric boundary layer↗

DOE OSTI2021

Bias Characterization, Vertical Interpolation, and Horizontal Interpolation for Distributed Wind Siting Using Mesoscale Wind Resource Estimates

Much like their counterparts in utility-scale wind energy, developers of industrial, small-scale and distributed wind turbine deployments need to understand and accurately characterize the wind resource to properly assess the power generation and financial ramifications during siting and planning. National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s WIND (Wind Integration National Dataset) Toolkit (WTK) provides a best-in-class wind resource dataset generated using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. This dataset includes parameters such as the wind speed, wind direction, and temperature at various heights, plus atmospheric stability near the surface. This data is available at 2-km spatial resolution and five-minute temporal resolution across 7 years, from 2007 to 2013 through a publicly accessible API interface. The Tools Assessing Performance (TAP) project seeks to extend this dataset to allow long term resource estimates and leverage it to better equip distributed wind equipment manufacturers, owner-operators, and installation professionals with better tools for practical siting applications. In this report, we present the results from our investigation within the TAP project focused on characterization of bias in WTK-based wind speed estimates and evaluation of vertical and horizontal interpolation techniques. We discuss the tradeoffs between different techniques and their combinations, as well as describe the lower bounds we determine for the studied validation errors. While the specific estimates we present are specific to WTK and the validation dataset we have chosen for this investigation (NREL's Wind Resource Meteorological Database), the overall analysis and the studied techniques are general enough to be applied to a broader set of wind datasets, both simulation-based and observational.

17 WIND ENERGY↗