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At least 703 records · Page 39

Wind utilization in remote regions: An economic study

A wind driven generator was considered as a supplement to a diesel group, for the purpose of economizing fuel when wind power is available. A specific location on Hudson's Bay, Povognituk, was selected. Technical and economic data available for a wind machine of 10-kilowatt nominal capacity and available wind data for that region were used for the study. After subtracting the yearly wind machine costs from savings in fuel costs, a net savings of $1400 per year is realized. These values are approximate, but are though to be highly conservative.

Vansant, J. H.↗

Energy Transmission and Infrastructure Northern Ohio (OH)

The objective of Energy Transmission and Infrastructure Northern Ohio (OH) was to lay the conceptual and analytical foundation for an energy economy in northern Ohio that will: • improve the efficiency with which energy is used in the residential, commercial, industrial, agricultural, and transportation sectors for Oberlin, Ohio as a district-wide model for Congressional District OH-09; • identify the potential to deploy wind and solar technologies and the most effective configuration for the regional energy system (i.e., the ratio of distributed or centralized power generation); • analyze the potential within the district to utilize farm wastes to produce biofuels; • enhance long-term energy security by identifying ways to deploy local resources and building Ohio-based enterprises; • identify the policy, regulatory, and financial barriers impeding development of a new energy system; and • improve energy infrastructure within Congressional District OH-09. This objective of laying the foundation for a renewable energy system in Ohio was achieved through four primary areas of activity: 1. district-wide energy infrastructure assessments and alternative-energy transmission studies; 2. energy infrastructure improvement projects undertaken by American Municipal Power (AMP) affiliates in the northern Ohio communities of Elmore, Oak Harbor, and Wellington; 3. Oberlin, OH-area energy assessment initiatives; and 4. a district-wide conference held in September 2011 to disseminate year-one findings. The grant supported 17 research studies by leading energy, policy, and financial specialists, including studies on: current energy use in the district and the Oberlin area; regional potential for energy generation from renewable sources such as solar power, wind, and farm-waste; energy and transportation strategies for transitioning the City of Oberlin entirely to renewable resources and considering pedestrians, bicyclists, and public transportation as well as drivers in developing transportation policies; energy audits and efficiency studies for Oberlin-area businesses and Oberlin College; identification of barriers to residential energy efficiency and development of programming to remove these barriers; mapping of the solar-photovoltaic and wind-energy supply chains in northwest Ohio; and opportunities for vehicle sharing and collaboration among the ten organizations in Lorain County from the private, government, non-profit, and educational sectors. With non-grant funds, organizations have begun or completed projects that drew on the findings of the studies, including: creation of a residential energy-efficiency program for the Oberlin community; installation of energy-efficient lighting in Oberlin College facilities; and development by the City of Oberlin and Oberlin College of a 2.27 megawatt solar photovoltaic facility that is expected to produce 3,000 megawatt-hours of renewable energy annually, 12% of the College’s yearly power needs. Implementation of these and other projects is evidence of the economic feasibility and technical effectiveness of grant-supported studies, and additional projects are expected to advance to implementation in the coming years. The public has benefited through improved energy-delivery systems and reduced energy use for street lighting in Elmore, Oak Harbor, and Wellington; new opportunities for assistance and incentives for residential energy efficiency in the Oberlin community; new opportunities for financial and energy savings through vehicle collaboration within Lorain County; and decreased reliance on fossil fuels and expanded production of renewable energy in the region. The dissemination conference and the summary report developed for the conference also benefited the public, but making the findings and recommendations of the regional studies broadly available to elected officials, city managers, educators, representatives of the private sector, and the general public.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

2014 Wind Technologies Market Report

According to the 2014 Wind Technologies Market Report, total installed wind power capacity in the United States grew at a rate of eight percent in 2014, bringing the United States total installed capacity to nearly 66 gigawatts (GW), which ranks second in the world and meets 4.9 percent of U.S. end-use electricity demand in an average year. In total, 4,854 MW of new wind energy capacity were installed in the United States in 2014. The 2014 Wind Technologies Market Report also finds that wind energy prices are at an all-time low and are competitive with wholesale power prices and traditional power sources across many areas of the United States. Additionally, a new trend identified by the 2014 Wind Technologies Market Report shows utility-scale turbines with larger rotors designed for lower wind speeds have been increasingly deployed across the country in 2014. The findings also suggest that the success of the U.S. wind industry has had a ripple effect on the American economy, supporting 73,000 jobs related to development, siting, manufacturing, transportation, and other industries.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Wind Vision Detailed Roadmap Actions: 2017 Update

In March 2015, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released Wind Vision: A New Era for Wind Power in the United States, which explores and quantifies the economic and environmental costs and benefits of a scenario in which wind provides 10% of U.S. electrical demand in 2020, 20% in 2030, and 35% in 2050. The Wind Vision report also includes a Roadmap that describes actions stakeholders can pursue to achieve the vision and its underlying wind deployment scenario. The Wind Vision and its Roadmap were compiled by representatives from DOE and its national laboratories in consultation with the wind industry, trade associations, academia, environmental organizations, and other stakeholders. When the Wind Vision was released in 2015, DOE announced its intention to engage the wind community from time to time to track progress and update the Roadmap periodically.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

2022 Cost of Wind Energy Review [Slides]

The 12th annual Cost of Wind Energy Review, now presented in slide deck format, uses representative utility-scale and distributed wind energy projects to estimate the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for land-based and offshore wind power plants in the United States.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

National Skills Assessment of the U.S. Wind Industry in 2012

A robust workforce is essential to developing domestic wind power projects, including manufacturing, siting, operations, maintenance, and research capabilities. The purpose of our research is to better understand today's domestic wind workforce, projected workforce needs as the industry grows, and how existing and new programs can meet the wind industry's future education and training needs. Results presented in this report provide the first published investigation into the detailed makeup of the wind energy workforce, educational infrastructure and training needs of the wind industry. Insights from this research into the domestic wind workforce will allow the private sector, educational institutions, and federal and state governmental organizations to make workforce-related decisions based on the current employment and training data and future projections in this report.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Tools Assessing Performance (FY2022 Quarter 4 Report)

We were finally successful in acquiring TTU’s 200-meter tower data for the duration of the Isolated Building Wake Experiment (IBWE). This data will provide an independent measurement of the undisturbed wind profile including heights far above those that are typical of meteorological sensor networks. These measurements will characterize the mean and turbulence throughout the atmospheric surface layer, which will be particularly useful for validation of highfidelity computational fluid dynamics models. This dataset can be shared freely among the TAP team but not outside of it as TTU sells this data to the wind power industry. The journal article overview has been submitted to LANL’s publication review and will be submitted to the Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics once the review is complete. We are nearing completion on another two articles. The first discusses analyses of the evolution of the measurements of mean wind speed along the centerline of the building as a function of atmospheric stability. Rather than using individual time steps, all of the wind speed measurements are normalized using the upwind measurement at 2 building heights (H) and filtered by wind direction and atmospheric stability. The second discusses the development of the diffusive wake model and uses the averaged profiles from the first article to validate the behavior of the model. The portion of the section below on the diffusive wake model discussing comparisons with the averaged profiles, will be included in the validation section of this paper.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Windfarm Operations and Maintenance cost-Benefit Analysis Tool (WOMBAT)

This report provides technical documentation and background on the newly-developed Wind Operations and Maintenance cost-Benefit Analysis Tool (WOMBAT) software. WOMBAT is an open-source model that can be used to obtain cost estimates for operations and maintenance of land-based or offshore wind power plants. The software was designed to be flexible and modular to allow for implementation of new strategies and technological innovations for wind plant maintenance. WOMBAT uses a process-based simulation approach to model day-to-day operations, repairs, and weather conditions. High-level outputs from WOMBAT, including time-based availability and annual operating costs, are found to agree with published results from other models.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

On the detection of magnetospheric radio bursts from Uranus and Neptune

Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn are sources of intense but sporadic bursts of electromagnetic radiation or magnetospheric radio bursts (MRB). The similarity of the differential power flux spectra of the MRB from all three planets is examined. The intensity of the MRB is scaled for the solar wind power input into a planetary magnetosphere. The possibility of detecting MRB from Uranus and Neptune is considered.

Kennel, C. F.↗

IUE low-dispersion spectra of four luminous stars in symmetric nebulae

The stars and nebulae are HD 56925 in NGC 2359, + 60 deg 2522 in NGC 7635, AG Car in its nebula, and 209 BAC in M1-67. A discussion of known properties of these systems precedes the IUE data, which are tabulated with types and identifications of significant line features and velocities of ultraviolet-displaced absorption features. Weaver et al.'s theory of the interaction of a stellar wind with the ambient interstellar medium is applied to the combined observational data. This gives a table of self-consistent values for stellar terminal wind velocity, rate of mass loss, and wind power; nebular mass, radius, expansion velocity, and age; also ambient interstellar density and mass swept up from the interstellar medium by the wind. The relatively infrequent occurrence of such symmetric nebulae around young, massive stars is possibly related to the short lifetimes of the nebulae in comparison with stellar evolution lifetimes.

Johnson, H. M.↗

Hierarchical Control Scheme for Improving Transient Voltage Recovery of a DFIG-Based WPP

Modern grid codes require that wind power plants (WPPs) inject reactive power according to the voltage dip at a point of interconnection (POI). This requirement helps to support a POI voltage during a fault. However, if a fault is cleared, the POI and wind turbine generator (WTG) voltages are likely to exceed acceptable levels unless the WPP reduces the injected reactive power quickly. This might deteriorate the stability of a grid by allowing the disconnection of WTGs to avoid any damage. This paper proposes a hierarchical control scheme of a doubly-fed induction generator (DFIG)-based WPP. The proposed scheme aims to improve the reactive power injecting capability during the fault and suppress the overvoltage after the fault clearance. To achieve the former, an adaptive reactive power-to-voltage scheme is implemented in each DFIG controller so that a DFIG with a larger reactive power capability will inject more reactive power. To achieve the latter, a washout filter is used to capture a high frequency component contained in the WPP voltage, which is used to remove the accumulated values in the proportional-integral controllers. Test results indicate that the scheme successfully supports the grid voltage during the fault, and recovers WPP voltages without exceeding the limit after the fault clearance.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

2017 Wind Technologies Market Report

This annual report provides an overview of developments and trends in the U.S. wind power market, with a particular focus on the year 2017.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

2018 Wind Technologies Market Report

The 2018 Wind Technologies Market Report—now in its thirteenth consecutive year—provides an overview of developments and trends in the U.S. wind power market, with a particular focus on the year 2018.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Investigation of model parameters for high-resolution wind energy forecasting: case studies over simple and complex terrain

We report that wind power forecasting, turbine micrositing, and turbine design require high-resolution simulations of atmospheric flow. Case studies at two West Coast North American wind farms, one with simple and one with complex terrain, are explored using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. Both synoptically and locally driven events that include some ramping are considered. The performance of the model with different grid nesting configurations, turbulence closures, and grid resolutions is investigated through comparisons with observation data. For the simple terrain site, no significant improvement in the simulation results is found when using higher resolution. In contrast, for the complex terrain site, there is significant improvement when using higher resolution, but only during the locally driven event. This suggests the possibility that computational resources could be spared under certain conditions, for example when the topography is adequately resolved at coarser resolutions. Physical parameters such as soil moisture have a very large effect, but mostly for the locally forced events for both simple and complex terrain. The effect of the PBL scheme choice varies significantly depending on the meteorological forcing and terrain. On average, prognostic TKE equation schemes perform better than non-local eddy viscosity schemes.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Workshop on Research Needs for Offshore Wind Resource Characterization: Summary Report

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Wind Energy Technologies Office convened “Research Needs for Offshore Wind Resource Characterization,” a workshop in Alexandria, Virginia, on March 5–6, 2019. Wind resource characterization includes meteorological information to estimate annual energy production, forecasts to ensure economical and reliable wind energy integration, and turbulence characterization for developing and applying design load criteria. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together representatives from the offshore wind industry and marine environmental research community to share views on meteorological and oceanographic information needed to successfully develop offshore wind projects in the United States. It was also intended to identify current industry knowledge gaps that can be effectively addressed by researchers with current and emerging observational and modeling tools. The workshop was in response to one of the key challenges articulated in the National Offshore Wind Strategy: reducing costs and technology risks through improved offshore wind power resource and site characterization. The strategy noted that “a better understanding of the unique meteorological, ocean, and seafloor conditions across U.S. offshore wind development sites will allow for optimized designs, reduced capital costs, greater safety, and less uncertainty in preconstruction energy estimates, resulting in reduced financing costs.” The workshop built on the National Offshore Wind Strategy, as well as previous workshops and reports that have informed this research area, providing the basis for future investment in offshore resource characterization research. The 1.5-day workshop involved 55 participants with comparable numbers of representatives from industry, academia, national laboratories, and federal agencies. The meeting included a small number of participants from Europe. The structure was to seed discussions with presentations by national and international leaders in their respective disciplines, followed by discussion among all participants. Discussion began with current industry needs and gaps for metocean information from the European perspective as well as considering unique aspects of the U.S. offshore environment. Those topics were followed by discussion of information needs specifically to address offshore wind system design requirements. These sessions provided the context for the third primary area of discussion, which was current capabilities and challenges for the research community in providing the needed information. This input will inform DOE, other state and federal agencies, research institutions, and industry stakeholders in making decisions about potential research and development (R&D) efforts supporting the development of offshore wind energy in the United States.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

2017 Annual Technology Baseline (ATB): Cost and Performance Data for Electricity Generation Technologies

Each year since 2015, NREL has presented Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) in a spreadsheet that contains detailed cost and performance data (both current and projected) for renewable and conventional technologies. The spreadsheet includes a workbook for each technology. This spreadsheet provides data for the 2017 ATB. In this edition of the ATB, offshore wind power has been updated to include 15 technical resource groups. And, two options are now provided for representing market conditions for project financing, including current market conditions and long-term historical conditions. For more information, see https://atb.nlr.gov/ .

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗

Colorado: Colorado's Clean Energy Resources and Economy [Brochure]

With its abundant renewable energy resources and continued focus on supporting renewable energy deployment, Colorado has emerged as a leader in clean energy. Currently, 14% of Colorado’s generated electricity comes from renewable resources. Colorado’s high Rocky Mountain ridges offer considerable wind power potential, some of which has been tapped to supply nearly 10% of Colorado’s in-state electricity generation. Colorado’s 1,800 megawatts of installed wind capacity ranks the state ninth in the nation. Colorado’s use of solar is also impressive, with considerable growth in recent years: Colorado currently ranks third in the nation in installed solar photovoltaic capacity (more than 120 megawatts) and is in the top five states for concentrated solar power installed nameplate capacity. State policies supporting renewable energy deployment have positively contributed to this growth. Colorado’s Renewable Energy Standard requires investor-owned electric utilities to generate 30% of their power from renewable energy resources by 2020. Colorado also strongly supports efforts to reduce energy waste; in response to a 2007 legislative mandate, the Colorado’s Public Utilities Commission directed utilities to help their customers reduce electricity use, and Colorado utility companies currently sponsor approximately 50 rebate programs for energy efficiency and renewable energy.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

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↗