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Wind Farms To Receive Future Wind Forecasts
An anonymous reader writes "If the US plans to develop wind farms across the country they need a better way to predict the wind direction and the duration. NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) is looking to do just that. In December, NCAR signed an agreement with Xcel Energy to develop a wind prediction system for the company's wind energy farms in Colorado, Minnesota, and Texas. Experimental forecasts may start as early as May. At present, most wind forecasts rely heavily on statistical forecasting methods, since the numerical weather forecast products available from operational centers are produced with coarse-grid, larger-scale models. The RTFDDA system, however, is designed to provide a birds-eye view of local weather for small areas of special interest, like wind farms, through a multiple level downscaling algorithm." I hope that decentralized weather-data gathering stations (like many people have feeding data to The Weather Underground) would be useful for this purpose.
First post.
This story really blows. The author is rather long-winded.
So what will they do with the wind forecast?
It's not like they turn off the windmills when there is no wind. The ones that cannot be rotated gain no benefit from knowing the direction. And the ones that can be rotated rotate automatically based on the current wind, not in anticipation of a future wind.
Perhaps I should be turning off my solar panels at night, or on cloudy days. (hmm... Actually, there are diodes to do that to prevent the panels from consuming stored energy)
Unless the concern is about freak high winds that exceed the capacity of the farm and pose a threat to the systems operating there, I don't see the point. Couldn't they be better served by surveying locations? Shouldn't their model be based on average output, and wouldn't historical data be a much better indicator for that? I mean it's not like there's a lot you can do to control how the wind will be blowing and the systems are hopefully already actively synced with the direction of the wind. The tie in to the grid has to be an active process anyways, in case of failure, and is produced as a byproduct of a conditioning system anyhow. Is there something I'm missing here? Is this really cheaper than sending out a guy with a weather balloon?
Oh honey look... How cute... an angry slashdotter!
I am always a little peeved when a private organization calls themselves the 'National' this or that.
They are free to do it, sure, it just seems like someone is angling for a little unwarranted validity when they choose names like that.
If windmills were distributed widely enough, they could produce their own prediction data. i.e. windmill A, downwind from windmill B, should use windmill B's output as a predictor. Or, more broadly, windmill A would rely on a set of windmills within a given radius for prediction data. This would require a much larger distribution than will be available any time soon, but would probably be the best way to go in the long term. P2P wind power prediction. Me likey.
When your primary source of income is based on utilizing wind energy to generate electricity, it makes every sense to look into the wind patterns and predict those in the future.
The velocity of wind, the climate during those months, etc. is quite crucial in determining how many turbines would be required to maintain a constant supply/demand ratio.
I'm pretty sure that civil engineers and architects have to predict rain patterns when they are building dams or hydroelectric generation stations.
Face your daemons!
Probably sponsered by Taco Bell
Okay, this may be a stupid question, but I just don't know the answer:
Could the actual wind speed that we experience on the earth's surface be noticeably reduced if we go crazy building lots of wind mills? (I don't mean if you're standing right next to the wind mill tower. I'm talking about a more regional effect.)
This doesn't seem to be a plan to better site windmills or increase their efficiency, but rather a way of predicting their near-future output to ease grid operation. If you know how much electricity your wind-farm is likely to produce tomorrow, you can better plan which non-wind power plants need to be operating, and at what levels. That can make things cheaper, because you can ramp up or down base-load power stations rather than having to rely on last-minute emergency generation when your wind farm produced less electricity than expected.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Here I was trying to figure out how Dale Evans was going to help with the wind turbines....damn dyslexia!
The research has already been done in Europe. There are about four serious companies offering more or less precise wind(-power) predictions.
Here in Germany there are five energy providers. Each of them relies on these predictions.
With these predictions the energy providers save millions of euros. The reason is that e.g. gas-fired power plants can be shut down while there comes enough power out of the wind mills. This requires some planning (normally with 1-3 day ahead predictions).
So what overall affect do all these windfarms have on the natural winds that blow across the surface have? As in whats the impact on the weather for one? Warmer temps maybe? I just see wind as being another hydro dam. Looks nice but look at all those problems it causes after we have it going for abit and realize it.
The problem they are trying to address is supporting demand planning for the grid. Most conventional power sources require a long time to change their output. So in addition to the changes in grid load over time one has to be able to compensate for the short term variability of wind. That is one of the reasons why places that build a lot of wind power also build gas turbine generators -- these are the only power sources that can change their output fast enough to backfill wind. This is also the dirty secret of wind -- while wind is 'green' using it in a modern grid needs additional backup power from fuel-burning sources. So the carbon offset is questionable. What is worse is that wind results from large scale circulation patterns in the atmosphere -- studies in Canada and Europe have shown that wind levels are closely correlated over very large distances. So covering the landscape with turbines means that the power sag when wind dies will be huge, as will the need for backup power. Or we just get used to living like a 3rd world country with regular blackouts.
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.