PROGRAM INFORMATION

HOLYOKE - 6/21/2006 through 10/6/2007

DATA DETAILS

June 21, 2006 through July 15, 2007:

The anemometer tower was installed on June 21, 2006. The site was located approximately 17.4 miles south of the town of Holyoke and east of U.S. Highway 385. The terrain is relatively flat, with less than 80 feet of relief over a mile. The tower is located in pasture, but cropland can be found immediately north of the site. A farmstead was located about 1,000 feet NNE of the site.

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 30m. This equipment fed into an NRG Wind Explorer data logger. Eight 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 times on some of the other data plugs were also changed. The original data plug files and text versions of these files (with corrected dates and times for the first plug and the files for the remaining data plugs 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. This corrected data and wind resource summary report for the period from June 21, 2006 through November 12, 2006 are available here:

• UND_Holyoke_2006_0621_to_2007_0715.txt
• Holyoke_Wind_Resource_Summary_Report_2006_0621_to_2006_1112.pdf

July 15, 2007 through October 6, 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. For this data, an offset of +46° was applied to the wind vane data. For this report, a data quality analysis similar to the UND analysis was performed for the data from for the period from June 21, 2006 through November 12, 2006. This data was filtered two ways:

1. Any wind speed data where the wind speed was less than 1 mph for 3 hours or more was deleted.
2. Any wind direction data where the wind direction varied by less than 3 degrees over six hours was deleted

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

• Holyoke_Wind_Resource_Summary_Report_2006_0621_to_2007_1006.pdf
• Holyoke_1241_2006_0621_to_2007_1006_without_data_quality.windog
• Holyoke_1241_2006_0621_to_2007_1006_without_data_quality.txt
• Holyoke_1241_2006_0621_to_2007_1006_with_data_quality_offset_46.windog
• Holyoke_1241_2006_0621_to_2007_1006_with_data_quality_offset_46.txt

Complete Wind Resource Summary

The anemometer tower was removed from the site on October 6, 2007. Highlights of the wind resource at this site for the entire data collection period using the Windographer for the data adjusted for data quality and offset by +46° 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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