BSU works with government, industry to improve wind power efficiency 

Predicting when and how forcefully wind will drive power generation down to the blades of a turbine would help solve several fundamental problems faced by wind power – from the lack of storage on transmission grids, to the variability of wind currents.

But using a combination of meteorology, mechanical engineering and computer science, researchers at the Boise State University College of Engineering are developing a system that may provide a solution.

“We know we can do this but not how fast or accurately,” said Todd Haynes, a Boise State research engineer working on the project. “We want to find out if we can do it in a way that makes it worth it.”

Haynes is working with lead researcher and professor Paul Dawson, and engineering graduate students Alan Russell and Kevin Nuss, on modeling anticipated wind speeds and effects using multi-scale computational codes. Testing is being done on power forecasting and generation every five minutes of every hour on a wind farm owned and operated by John Deere Renewable Energy near Mountain Home.

John Deere is sharing the farm’s operational data for comparison, while the Idaho National Laboratory is providing instrumentation that can download wind speeds almost instantaneously. Other partners on the project include Renaissance Engineering & Design, which is using another modeling tool to augment and verify the team’s forecasts, and Idaho Power, which is sharing knowledge of grid operation.

“This is a collaboration between an educational institution, a government agency, a public utility and private companies,” said Mark Stokes, Idaho Power’s manager of power supply planning. “These efforts to improve wind forecasting will have a positive impact on system reliability as Idaho Power continues to add more wind generation into its portfolio of generation resources.”

The yearlong project is being funded by the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency that operates most of the Northwest’s high-voltage transmission and provides about half the electricity in the region. BPA is responding to a pledge from the Obama administration to double U.S. renewable energy production by 2012. The Boise State team will present its work at the American Wind Energy Association’s Windpower 2009 conference in Chicago, May 4-7.

“What we learn could definitely be applied everywhere, and it’s a potential job generator if we can significantly overcome some of these challenges,” Haynes said.

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