AWS Truepower Makes Wind Project Design More Effective with Less Effort with New Openwind® Version
New edition enhances time-series energy production simulation and improves tools for optimizing wind project layouts, among other features
ALBANY, New York, Oct. 2, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- AWS Truepower, LLC, an international leader in renewable energy consulting and information services, announced a major upgrade to its Openwind wind project design and optimization software.
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Among other new features, this version greatly enhances time-series energy production simulations. All losses are now modeled in a realistic way, including turbine downtime, wakes, electrical losses, and environmental curtailment strategies.
Focusing on curtailment as an example, Nick Robinson, Director of Openwind, said "many wind projects today are obliged to operate within complicated noise, wildlife, and other constraints that may depend on wind speed, direction, and time of day or time of year. This latest version of Openwind makes it much easier to model the impacts of these strategies on energy production."
Combining this new detailed loss modelling with recently added features such as time-queryable, multi-height wind resource grids and multi-height time-series files from towers, lidar, or sodar, makes Openwind the first software to fully incorporate the spatial and time dimensions into the wind resource assessment process. It also allows users to use operational plant data to inform pre-construction energy estimates.
As part of the release, Openwind comes with a new icing loss model, developed through AWS Truepower research, which can be customized by the user to account for temperature, precipitation, and humidity. Plant and turbine availability is modeled realistically, as well, through a sophisticated Markov chain approach derived from actual plant data.
The software now also features improved tools for wind project optimization that create more realistic layouts with less user effort. The likely impact of wakes on effective turbulence intensity can be used to automatically size sector-wise turbine separation distances. Openwind also includes improved tools for optimization of gridded layouts that help users optimize for either energy or cost of energy in areas of relatively flat terrain or offshore.
"The process for producing gridded layouts for offshore development was previously pretty labor intensive," according to Nick. "In this version of Openwind that whole process has been automated, which will save our users a lot of valuable time."
Optimizing layouts under noise constraints is also improved with the ability to automatically optimize and schedule complex noise reduction strategies.
The new version of Openwind is available immediately. For pricing and additional feature information please visit the Openwind website. Openwind director, Nick Robinson also maintains a blog for Openwind information and learning.
About Openwind:
Openwind is a wind project design and optimization software application created to provide professional wind developers with a highly configurable toolbox of capabilities for energy capture and beyond. Using an industry-leading geographical information systems (GIS) interface, users can optimize for cost of energy, assess deep array impacts, define and analyze strategies for managed shut-down of turbines, and manage uncertainty.
About AWS Truepower, LLC:
AWS Truepower provides the most accurate, reliable, and innovative clean energy project development, engineering and operations solutions available today. Energy developers, investors, utilities, system operators, and governments rely on the company's 30 years of experience, proven expertise and technology to reduce uncertainty, mitigate risk, and maximize return on their investments. AWS Truepower's suite of consulting and engineering services, innovative software, maps, and data products support the complete wind and solar project development lifecycle. Headquartered in New York, AWS Truepower has offices in North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia. Learn more about the company online at www.awstruepower.com.
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