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.

Comments

Why?

[MobyDisk]

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)

Re:Why?

[rev_deaconballs]

Of my experience of main stream articles on research, it often completely misses the true reason behind the research. My guess is that they deemed this story more entertaining due to the interest in alternative energy. If that was the underlying reason behind the grant proposal I am sure they would not get funding for the very reason you mentioned. The data from that research seems highly valuable but for other reasons.

Re:Why?

[Duradin]

Why would an energy company want to have an estimate of how much or how little a particular portion of their grid is going to produce? What could they possibly do with that sort of information? It's not like our electrical grid is built to primarily rely on a very steady base load and doesn't tolerate spikes well...

Re:Why?

[Jason Pollock]

There are several reasons that power generators (of any kind) want accurate weather reports.

1) Thermal generation: They have consents that limit the temperature of their waste water. If the temperature exceeds a certain temperature, they can't shed it fast enough, lowering their generation capacity.
2) Wind generation: If the wind is too low, you don't generate. If it's too high, again, you don't generate. During the two points there is a curve indicating the amount of power you will generate.
3) Hydro: The rain you will receive needs to be rationed over the season. No rain in the forecast, you can't generate as much power.

It's all about forecasting how much power you can generate. These providers all have contracts to provide a fixed amount of power to their customers. If they cannot meet that obligation, they have to purchase it from other providers. The sooner they know if they will have to buy on the wholesale market, the cheaper it is for them.

Otherwise, they have to be even more cautious, since the power generation from hydro and wind can be bursty. This limits their ability to supply power to those requiring guaranteed power delivery.

Re:Why?

[harperska]

Actually, it is very useful to know what output your wind farm will have in the next hour or in the next day. Utilities are constantly monitoring their generation resources so they can plan ahead. It would be beneficial to Xcel to know today that tomorrow windfarm A will not be producing as much electricity, so they can make a deal now to buy that electricity from someplace else at better prices than if they suddenly had to buy in that electricity tomorrow when they realized their windfarm wasn't producing. Or maybe, they know that it will be very windy next week, so they make a deal with another utility to sell that extra power that they know they are going to have. Electricity is bought and sold up to months in advance of when it is actually generated, so it is very important to know how much you will be able to generate in that time. It's all economics.

I'm questioning the value

[ruin20]

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?

They could be their own prediction system

[greg_barton]

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.

Re:Since it's their means of livelihood

[von_rick]

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.

probably more operational information

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:Let me be the first to say...

[glittalogik]

Do you have to put up such a cold front?

Re:Wind prediction is common in Germany

[GPSguy]

The state of prediction in Europe isn't as good as you might think. Nor is it in corporate America. That's a big reason NCAR is getting involved. Several of us are working on how to make WRF or a similar weather model work to forecast at the appropriate heights where the turbine blades work. AND at the resolutions required.

One wind prediction company I'm aware of here claims to have resolutions as fine as 250m for the whole US. What I know of the model they're using, however, suggests that the model isn't stable at that high a resolution. Getting models to behave as we adapt them for new tasks isn't always easy...