AWS Truepower LLC, a provider of renewable energy consulting and information services, has joined a model inter-comparison task from the International Energy Agency called WakeBench.
The more than 40 participating organizations representing 12 countries are charged with improving best practices for wind farm modeling techniques and providing a forum for industrial, governmental and academic partners. The results aim to help develop, evaluate and improve the atmospheric boundary layer and wind turbine wake models for use in both onshore and offshore wind energy.
‘Our goal is to advance the industry's ability to accurately model wind turbine wakes, especially in large wind farms,’ says Philippe Beaucage, senior research scientist at AWS Truepower. "AWS Truepower has developed two wake models over the past two years: the Deep-Array Wake Model, which is currently implemented in our openWind Enterprise software for wind park design, and a research model based on Large-Eddy Simulations. WakeBench gives us the opportunity to validate and improve these models."
Each WakeBench participant will run its wake model using the same initial conditions in order to do a fair comparison. The models will be validated at several different sites. This project started in October 2011, will last for three years, and is being co-managed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Centre of Spain (CENER). CENER is putting together all the test cases and will gather the results from each model and perform the comparison.
