wind farms for data

[Nicholas_Scherber]

I just saw the thread started on wind farms being picked up on radar, and that reminded me of a conversation i had with one of my parents friends. He works for a wind farm and told me that on 6-17, some of the turbines got hit by a tornado in southern mn. Apparently he was able to read the info off of each of these turbines and got wind speeds from multiple times during the tornados cycle from a couple hundred feet(not sure exactly how tall they are). This got me thinking, wind farms are hit by storms all over the plains every year, what if someone where to equip each turbine with various instuments at different heights. I know it is not the most practical thing in the world but i thought it was an interesting idea. any thoughts?

 

[Lanny Dean]

Actually Nicholas I think your idea is a pretty good one. Of course there would be some concerns but it could certainly be done much as we do with mesonet sites/ASOS sites. I think the key point your brought up that interested me was placing them at different heights...this could give much data especially if one were to take a direct hit from a lower scale tornado and survive.

Interesting thoughts dude.

 

[Chris Gullikson]

I have often thought how valuable a grid of weather instruments mounted on radio towers would be. There are tens of thousands of radio towers out there, many of them over 1000 feet. Imagine the resolution of the boundary layer one could get by sampling the air every few hundred feet. MLCAPE, 0-1 SRH, etc would have much higher accuracy. The locations and depths/slopes of mesoscale and microscale boundaries would be very accurate. I think it would be very interesting to see the boundary layer mix-out late morning while watching obs on a 2000 foot tower.

It likely won't happen, but cool to think about.

 

[Jeff Duda]

I think a majority of wind turbines at most wind farms have an anemometer at hub height (80 meters). But these instruments are privately owned, and the owners may not be willing to share data (if you can even find who they are). It could also be that they don't know or remember when their farm takes a hit from a tornado and wouldn't know anyway. You could certainly try looking up the owner of a wind farm and trying to see if you can get data. I know one of my ISU colleagues is using such data for his masters work.

 

[Darren Addy]

One of the things the company I work for is into is wind power. First, a wind turbine is not an anemometer. While they must respond to certain thresholds of windspeed (to shutdown, etc.), they have blade inertia (among other things) that would make them extremely unreliable as anemometers. Secondly, for an anemometer to give you "clean" data, it has to be unaffected by obstructions or turbulence caused by things around it. That's why an anemometer mounted ON a wind turbine cannot really be used as a perfect picture of windspeed. Thirdly, as most of us already know, wind speed increases with height. That's why you will see wind maps look very differently when they are drawn for different hub/wind heights. Most of the interest is in collecting data on the tornado windspeeds in the lowest 30 feet or so - because that is where the majority of humans and their property resides. It is there that the main debris field will be, as well as turbulence and obstructions that affect the damage on the ground.

Forgetting windspeed for a moment, it would be really interesting to have a barometer inside each turbine (in fact, multiple barometers in each turbine tower at different heights). If a tornado goes through a wind farm, it would be very interesting have a higher resolution map of the pressure drops (and at various elevations) as a tornado moves through.

 

[Todd Renshaw]

Interesting ideas.

And that reminds me of something I wondered (to myself) a while ago. What if the warning siren towers had anemometers installed that could activate the siren when a certain threshold was reached. (In my feeble understanding of how things work now, the local NWS office has to set them off manually, right?) There must be instances where a storm is not warned but produces damaging winds with a "footprint" small enough to go unnoticed remotely?

Reliability and false alarms would probably be an issue, eh?

Won't someone just invent the Star Trek-type sensor so we can dump these useless radars and study everything that can't be seen without condensation? Flying cars too. Where's my flying car?

 

[Skip Talbot]

And that reminds me of something I wondered (to myself) a while ago. What if the warning siren towers had anemometers installed that could activate the siren when a certain threshold was reached. (In my feeble understanding of how things work now, the local NWS office has to set them off manually, right?) There must be instances where a storm is not warned but produces damaging winds with a "footprint" small enough to go unnoticed remotely?

Local agencies like police and EMA control the sirens. If your siren is already being hit with severe wind, I think you've lost your chance to give any sort of advanced warning.

 

[Dan Robinson]

Each turbine has an anemometer/wind vane instrument mounted on top of the generator casing. The turbine uses this to automatically adjust the direction and pitch of the blades. Next time you see a gust front hit a wind farm, watch - all of the turbines will automatically turn to face the wind. Data quality could be questionable for some of the reasons Darren addressed, assuming it is collected somewhere (I'd assume it is logged).

 

[Todd Renshaw]

But the threshold doesn't have to be set to where the winds are already damaging. It could be a bit below that.

Ah well, just a throwaway, off-hand idea. I have a million of 'em. 99% may be garbage.

Thank you, Skip.

 

[Skip Talbot]

But the threshold doesn't have to be set to where the winds are already damaging. It could be a bit below that.

Ah well, just a throwaway, off-hand idea. I have a million of 'em. 99% may be garbage.

Thank you, Skip.

Yeah, I was thinking about that too. If you set the siren to go off at something like 45 or 50 mph, I think you'd then get a lot of false alarms. Anemometers on wind turbines and towers could give advanced warning to areas further downstream, however.

 

[Robert Edmonds]

There's a member on here that actually watches the readings from wind farms, hopefully he can chime in...

Talk like this always reminds me of when I was taking observations at the VLA in NM during monsoon season. We had some outflow from a 'dying' storm pass over the observatory. At the time, the 27 antennas were spread over 13 miles, and each had an anemometer. When the winds peaked over some threshold the antenna would 'stow' (i.e. point straight up), around 50-60mph. As the outflow progressed down the line of antennas, you would see each one stow. After you saw one stow it would be a few seconds till the next one in the line would do the same. My observations sucked, but it was pretty cool. Always thought it would be neat to get your hands on the wind measurements. I know who to ask since the wind measurements were needed once, because a new observatory was being built near by, and they wanted to know how strong the winds could be.

 

[ScottKoenig]

The company that I work for historizes all Wind Farm Data for use in "Wind Forecasting" models, this includes wind speed, direction, temperature and pressure. But after actually looking over the data each turbine records, temperature, wind speed, direction but each turbine does not record barometric pressure. The local MET tower records the barometric pressure for each wind farm site, I guess that makes sense pressure doesn't usually differ within a small area of a few square miles. The larger wind farms have multiple MET towers that record pressure, temp, wind speed, direction, etc.