Albany, N.Y.-based AWS Truewind LLC has won a competitive solicitation to work with the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) on a regional wind integration and modeling project.
The project, titled Development of Eastern Regional Wind Resource and Wind Plant Datasets, will examine the potential impacts of increased wind generation on the utility grid in the eastern U.S. The study region ranges from the Dakotas down to Oklahoma and eastward to Maine.
‘This major effort will combine our advanced wind flow modeling and wind forecasting techniques to better understand the impact of wind's variability on much of the country's electricity system,’ says Michael Brower, chief technical officer at AWS Truewind. ‘This variability will be defined at time scales as short as one minute over a three-year period.’
The multi-phase project will apply state-of-the-art weather simulation models to develop regional wind resource estimates, which will be used to produce output estimates for wind generation totaling several hundred GW of capacity, AWS Truewind adds. The data from this project will be used by the Eastern Wind Integration and Transmission Study, a regional wind modeling project directed by NREL.
