PROGRAM INFORMATION

STERLING - 7/08/2005 through 11/27/2006

DATA DETAILS

July 8, 2005 through November 27, 2006:

The anemometer tower was installed on July 8, 2005. The site was 7.5 miles northwest of the town of Sterling, Colorado. The tower wais located in a pasture on the northwest side of a farmstead. Other than a slight rise in terrain to the north of site, the landscape is fairly flat. The farmstead may impact winds from the southeast. Otherwise, the tower had good exposure to the wind.

All data was collected using an NRG #40 Anemometer and NRG #200 Wind Vane mounted on a tilt-up tower located on the landowner's property at a height of 20m. This equipment fed into an NRG Wind Explorer data logger. All data plugs were sent into the Governor's Energy Office and then to the University of North Dakota for analysis. All data plug files and text versions of these files are given below.

It is important to note that these are the raw files without any compensation for offset. It is also important to note that the temperature was not recorded during this period.

For this data, UND applied an offset of +66° to the wind vane data. This corrected data and wind resource summary report are available here:

• Sterling_Wind_Resource_Summary_Report_2005_0708_to_2006_1015.pdf
• UND_Sterling_2005_0708_to_2006_1127.txt

Note that the period of measurement is much different than the period covered in the report. Also, note that one additional data plug was received after the report was published. Finally, note that there is a gap in the data plug files from 3/27.2006 through 5/7/2006. This gap does appear in the corrected data file, but a gap does appera from 5/3/2006 at 7:00 a.m. to 5/7/2006 at 4:10 a.m. From this data, an analysis of the wind resource report was developed using Windographer 1.13. For this data, an offset of +66° was applied to the wind vane data. You can find the Windographer file below:

• UND_Sterling_2005_0708_to_2006_1127_without_data_quality.windog

Another analysis was developed from the corrected UND data by CSU using Windographer 1.13. A data quality analysis was performed for the data from for the period from July 8, 2005 through November 27, 2006. This data was filtered two ways:

1. Any wind speed data where UND had flagged as suspect data was deleted.
2. Any wind direction data where where UND had flagged as suspect data was deleted

Windographer was then used to add in synthetic data to these intervals with suspect data. The summary report, the Windographer file with the data quality analysis and the combined data file with the data quality analysis are given below:

• UND_Sterling_2005_0708_to_2006_1127_with_data_quality.windog
• UND_Sterling_2005_0708_to_2006_1127_with_data_quality.txt

Wind Resource Summary

Highlights of the wind resource at this site for the entire data collection period are shown below:

Windographer was used to match up the wind at this site with the performance curves of some common turbines of various sizes and various heights, allowing for losses of about 13%. The table below shows the results. For the larger turbines, the tower height was increased to account for the larger turbine blades - the wind resource was extrapolated to these higher heights. Keep in mind that the larger and the higher the turbine, the better the wind and the greater the output. But of course, as the tower heights and turbine sizes increase so does the cost.

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