To understand the impacts of these complex flow environments on wind turbine operations, the Scaled Wind Farm Technologies(SWiFT) facility was established for experimental study of turbine-turbine wake interactions.

NREL and Sandia recently published two reports on their collaborative effort to study the effects of increased maximum allowable blade tip velocities on overall system cost and performance. The maximum rotor rotation speed for utility-scale wind turbines is generally constricted by noise considerations. Even so, innovations in acoustics or siting in remote locations or both…