PROGRAM INFORMATION

FORT COLLINS/WINDSOR

10/2/2006 through 11/3/2007

DATA DETAILS

October 6, 2006 through July 15, 2007:

The anemometer tower was installed on October 6, 2006. The site was adjacent to the Highland Meadows Golf Course, about 4 miles south west of the town of Windsor. The tower was placed in a hay field about one and a half miles east of Interstate 25. The tower ws located in a sheltered area downhill from a ridge on the east.

All data was collected using an NRG #40 Anemometer and NRG #200P 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. Six data plugs were sent into the Governor's Energy Office and then to the University of North Dakota for analysis. The dates and times on the first data plug are incorrect, as the date and time were set after the data plug was installed in the datalogger. The original data plug files and text versions of these files (with corrected dates and times for the first plug corrected to Mountain Standard Time) 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 +46° to the wind vane data, but the wind vane was installed incorrectly or was faulty and so should be disregarded. This corrected data and wind resource summary report for the period from October 2, 2006 through February 27, 2007 are available here:

• UND_Fort Collins_2006_1002_to_2007_0715.txt
• Fort_Collins_Wind_Resource_Summary_Report_2006_1002_to_2007_0227.pdf

July 15, 2007 through November 3, 2007:

CSU was chosen as the contractor for the program on September 14, 2007. Data collected since September 14, 2007 are given below (with the text files corrected to Mountain Standard Time):

Again, it is important to note that these are the raw files without any compensation for offset or temperature.

From both the UND and CSU data, an analysis of the wind resource was developed using Windographer 1.13. No offset was applied to the wind vane data as it was faulty data. A data validation analysis was performed on the wind speed data. This data was filtered as follows:

1. Any wind speed data where the wind speed was less than 1 mph for 3 hours or more was deleted.

Windographer was then used to add in synthetic data to these intervals with suspect data. The combined data files (with and without the data validation analysis), and the Windographer files (with and without the data validation analysis) are given below:

• Fort Collins_Wind Resource Summary Report_2006_10_02_to_2007_11_03.pdf
• Fort_Collins_0666_2006_1002_to_2007_1103_without_data_validation.windog
• Fort_Collins_0666_2006_1002_to_2007_1103_without_data_validation.txt
• Fort_Collins_0666_2006_1002_to_2007_1103_with_data_validation.windog
• Fort_Collins_0666_2006_1002_to_2007_1103_with_data_validation.txt

Complete Wind Resource Summary

The anemometer tower was removed from the site on November 3, 2007. Highlights of the wind resource at this site for the entire data collection period using the Windographer for the validated data 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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