Welcome to News from WindLogics! The wind power industry is experiencing unprecedented change — new technologies, increasing requirements and unrelenting demand for financial performance. With this brief update, you'll see how WindLogics is advancing the state of wind knowledge to assist you in meeting these and other challenges.
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R&D News from the Sciences Center
Wake measurement and modeling - Downstream effects from both individual turbines and entire wind plants are very significant to energy production, yet the science of the energy and turbulence effects is not well understood. Dr. Bob Conzemius of the WindLogics Sciences Center is working with a team of scientists from the University of Minnesota on these issues.
This $1 million collaboration between the university's St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, WindLogics and Barr Engineering includes wind tunnel experiments, field measurement, and work on mesoscale, computational fluid dynamics and large eddy simulation models. The project (RD3-42) is sponsored by the Xcel Renewable Development Fund.
New Sodar units commissioned - Two next-generation Sodar units are now being tested in Minnesota and will be actively used for R&D and wind assessment campaigns this year. The Second Wind Triton units are relatively mobile and provide wind speed measurements across the entire swept area of the turbine blade, including highly accurate wind shear values. The units are self-powered with batteries and solar panels, and data is communicated back to the WindLogics Operations Center via satellite modem.
After being used for the current research project (see above), the units will be available for many other wind assessment, wake measurement and research purposes. To read more and see photos of the Triton, please read our recent press release. For more information on the Triton, visit Second Wind .
Upcoming Events
Mark Ahlstrom, WindLogics CEO, will be presenting a paper at the upcoming IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting in Calgary. The paper, titled The Role of Wind Forecasting on System Operation, takes a broad view on current challenges and opportunities for improvement.
“As wind power becomes a larger share of our generation, utilities and power system operators will need better tools and information to deal with wind variability,” said Mark. “Working to provide the best forecasts and visibility in the control room benefits everyone in the long run.”
Co-authors for the paper are Charlie Smith of UWIG, Bob Zavadil of EnerNex, and Ali Sadjadpour and Russell Philbrick of AREVA T&D.
Applied Innovation
Dr. Kashif Gill, Senior Atmospheric Scientist at WindLogics, presented a paper on Wind Power Predictions Using Swarm Intelligence and Machine Learning at the 11th IASTED International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Control. Kashif was assisted by Dr. Dennis Moon, Dr, Bruce Lee and Dave Elliott on this work.
Swarm computing methods allow us to dramatically increase the speed and performance of computational learning system methods that are core to advanced wind assessment and wind forecasting techniques. We've already started using these new methods for further optimizing wind assessment results.
