SWRF wind resource file creation

Juan,

Note that the P50/P90 analysis requires many (ideally close to 20 or more) years of data to effectively calculate the result. As we (NREL) don't have access to many years of quality hub-height wind data at this time, we have not enabled this feature for wind technologies.

As we move into the future and hopefully more data becomes available, we can enable that. Note that several private firms (such as 3Tier and AWS Truepower and WindLogics) do currently provide these types of calculations as a paid service to the wind industry.

Hi Paul

I had the same problem that Juan, but i could solve it. Now, wind speed of my place vary from 3 m/s to 6 m/s during the year (at 100m). Would you tell me what is the "feasible model" to simulate in SAM according with those wind speed? Should I choose the "Small Scale Wind" or "Utility Scale Wind" model?


Best regards,

Dibor

Dear Dibor,

In the current version of SAM (2012.5.11), we combined the large and small wind turbine models in to a single Wind Power model because the only real difference between the two was the type of wind data file each model read.

You can use the Wind Power model for any size of turbine, and any size of project.

We are currently working on more improvements to the wind model for the Fall 2012 version, so please let us know if you have any suggestions that we can consider for that version.

Best regards,
Paul.

If I have 30M data what's the power law equation to estimate data for other hub heights (above and below)... how do yo uadjust the power-law estimates for differing types of terrain?

If you are asking a general question, please see the Wind Gradient article in Wikipedia for one explanation. You can also search the web for the term "wind shear" to find other explanations.

SAM reads wind weather files with wind speed and direction data at different heights and uses the wind shear power law to extrapolate the wind speed from the wind data height that is closest to the turbine height.

Best regards,
Paul.