Wind Analysis

Stephen Lightfoote, blogdown.rmd=TRUE

5 minute read

The goal here is to illustrate how aspects of typical wind resource assessment and energy capture from meteorological data can be accomplished using open source tools, in this case using R. Using publicly available data, I’ll walk through some of the typical steps taken in site screening, importing, visualizing and analyzing meteorological data with the goal of modeling the annual energy capture of a wind turbine at a given location. For kicks, as a wink to the NIMBY’s out there, let’s use my…

Stephen Lightfoote

7 minute read

The purpose of this post is to illustrate an example method for assessing changes in performance for wind turbines based on the installation of performance modifications. In this case we’re looking at Vortex Generators (VG) which are typically after market hardware installed along wind turbine blades and are purported to improve blade performance by reducing flow separation, thereby improving lift, and increasing power efficiency.

Stephen Lightfoote

5 minute read

The purpose of this post is to illustrate different filtering techniques for calculating the actual power curve of a wind turbine using SCADA data. Typically data in which the turbine is experiencing downtime can be filtered out using status/fault/error codes provided by the Original Equipment Manufacturer’s (OEM) SCADA system. However, it has been my experience that these data are not of sufficient quality to properly filter out all ‘bad’ data and in many cases when analyzing a wind plant these…