Renewable energy consultancy Natural Power says its new wind modeling software is helping global wind power clients with a series of calculations and analysis of potential wind farm performance.
The company claims that its investment in new high-performance computing has enabled the business to produce results from its most advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models at wind farm scale within five to six days, rather than the 60 days previously needed.
‘The improved speed creates an obvious commercial advantage,’ says Claude Abiven, senior technical manager at Natural Power. ‘No client wants to wait 60 days for modeling outcomes. More significantly, it means we can increase certainty in our calculations, which can be directly translated into cost savings. When the bill for a wind farm runs in to hundreds of millions, that's an important factor – and a potential game changer for the industry."
Natural Power says it worked in partnership with the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Porto in Portugal and Renewable Energy Systems to develop a more advanced CFD. However, Natural Power realized the model would not be able to run effectively on its existing server. Therefore, the consultancy selected a SuperMicro supercomputer powered by Intel Xeon processor E5-2660 v3, and Natural Power says internal assessments have shown that this runs 1.7 times faster than the previous installation.
