Assessing sites offshore

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Excerpt: Gathering the geotechnical data needed to determine foundational engineering parameters is a painstaking component of any wind project, and further complicated when that project is offshore. Marine geotechnical studies, which involve the physical sampling and testing of seabed soil to determine its …

Remote sensor brings wind-condition data to wind farm operators

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Excerpt: A provider of wind measurement technology, software, and services, has announced a suite of wind farm operations services based on the company's Triton Sonic Wind Profiler and SkyServe Wind Data Service. Triton, a remote wind sensor, uses sodar (sound) to provide wind measurements across the tur …

High-res resource maps for Latin America

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Excerpt: Renewable energy consulting and information services company AWS Truepower has released high-resolution wind maps and data for the Caribbean, Central America, Mexico and South America. Wind resource averages and characteristics are available through annual subscriptions to AWS Truepower’s web-b …

New research on complex terrain, firmware upgrades improve data quality, and more

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Excerpt: Triton is a sonar-based wind sensor for measuring speed and direction at hub height and higher. Equipment users at a recent AWEA Wind Resource and Project Energy Assessment workshop learned about remote sensing research and the latest product developments — and gave feedback to developer Secon …

Sensor and Web companies team to display weather data and more on Web

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Excerpt: Atmospheric Systems Corporation (ASC) and Vista Engineering are working to streamline wind instrumentation data to end users. Vista’s Engineering’s web-based Vista Data Vision (VDV) lets users collect data from multiple sites and view it from a single dashboard. VDV creates web based graphs …

Sodar measures wind speeds up to 700m up

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Excerpt: The 2000 series SoDARs are intended as high-altitude sensors. These use three parabolic dishes in three separate enclosures. The 2000 series can operate in lower power consumption mode, pulsing each antenna at different time intervals. Or, they can be configured to sample all three beams simulta …

Wind energy performance map for Europe

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Excerpt: A recent map illustrates that for 2011, wind speeds were 5-10% above normal in northern Europe and up to 10% below normal in southern Europe. The data, collected by renewable energy assessment and forecasting company 3TIER,  shows departures from long-term mean wind speed with above normal area …

Site Assessment 101

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Excerpt: A first step in the development of a wind farm is to identify land with sufficient wind to support a commercial project. This calls for a series of studies, one of which is the wind-study assessment that looks at historical wind data. There may be a meteorological or met tower in the area that has a …

Renewable energy resources detailed online

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Excerpt: A new geospatial application developed by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) lets users easily and accurately map potential renewable energy resources in the U.S. The interactive tool, RE Atlas, is free to use and available online at http://maps.nrel.gov/ …

2011 wind energy performance map

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Excerpt: A recent map of wind performance throughout 2011 shows that wind speeds were above their season averages for most of the U.S. The map, from 3TIER, shows departures from long-term mean wind speeds that range from -20% to +20% and provides an indication of how wind projects should have performed …