PROGRAM INFORMATION

IDALIA: 7/17/2009 to 9/27/2009

CSU ALP Install Team (from left): Derrick Benallie, Todd MacDonald, Daniel Fink, Eric Rasbach, Brian Smith, Morgan Davis, Jake Renquist, and Mike Kostrzewa (taking picture).

DATA DETAILS

July 17, 2009 to September 27, 2009:

The anemometer tower was installed on July 17, 2009. The site is located in a field on the lessee's property just south U.S. Highway 36 about 2.5 miles west of Idalia in Yuma County. The terrain is flat in all directions, with the lessee's home NNW of the tower site. The nearest buildings are about 265 feet away.

Data is collected using three (3) NRG #40C Calibrated Anemometers and one (1) NRG #200P Wind Vane, as follows:

• Anemometers
  1. 33.8 m (111 feet) heading 253°on an NRG 60" standard boom
  2. 33.8 m (111 feet) heading 352° on an NRG 60" standard boom
  3. 20.0 m (66 feet) heading 290° on an NRG 60" standard boom
• Wind Vane
  1. 34.7 m (114 feet) heading 250° on an NRG 13" Z-mast with the null point facing toward the tower (with a small offset)

There was also a temperature sensor at a height of 1.8 m (6 feet) on a 6" boom.

All sensors feed into an NRG Symphonie data logger. The certifications for the anemometers are as follows:

The data logger generates wind reports for each day. Using the Symphonie Data Retriever software, each day's data is complied into one large data file. A zipped file that contains all of the NRG data files and a text version of the aggregate data for all days are given below:

It is important to note that the wind direction data included in these files has already been adjusted for offset at the data logger.

Using this data, an analysis of the wind resource report was developed using Windographer 1.45. For this report, a validation analysis was performed on the data. This data was filtered two ways:

1. Any wind speed data where the wind speed was less than 1 m/s for 3 hours or more when the temperature was less than 0°C was deleted.
2. Any wind direction data where the wind direction varied by less than 3 degrees over 3 hours when the temperature was less than 0°C was deleted.

Windographer was then used to add in synthetic data to these intervals with suspect data. During the period considered, there were no intervals of suspect data, so no synthetic data were added.

The combined data files, and the Windographer files are given below:

• Idalia_3902_2009_0717_to_2009_0927.windog
• Idalia_3902_Windog_2009_0717_to_2009_0927.txt

Current Wind Resource Summary

Highlights of the wind resource to date at this site are shown below:

Windographer was used to match up the wind at this site with the performance curves of some common turbines of various sizes and various heights, allowing for losses of about 13%. The table below shows the results. For the larger turbines, the tower height was increased to account for the larger turbine blades - the wind resource was extrapolated to these higher heights. Keep in mind that the larger and the higher the turbine, the better the wind and the greater the output. But of course, as the tower heights and turbine sizes increase so does the cost.

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