PROGRAM INFORMATION

AURORA - 04/09/2003 through 06/28/2004

DATA DETAILS

April 9, 2003 through June 28, 2004:

The anemometer tower was installed on April 9, 2003. The site was approximately 10.4 miles southwest of the town of Byers and I-70. The tower is located in a cultivated field next to bluffs along the West Bijou Creek. Tall vegetation and/or buildings are not present in the area. Hence, the site has good exposure to the wind in all directions. The bluffs could create significant amounts of turbulence in the wind, which could affect measurements of easterly or southerly winds at the site.

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.

Note that not all data plug files were available from UND for this site. 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 +20° to the wind vane data. This corrected data and wind resource summary report are available here:

• UND_Aurora_2003_0409_to_2004_0628.txt
• Aurora_Wind_Resource_Summary_Report_2003_0409_to_2004_0628.pdf

The file includes suspect data and when that data occurs, there is also a flag field that indicates these suspect data values. For a version of this wind data with blanks, you can download here.

CSU was chosen as the contractor for the program on September 14, 2007. Using the raw data from all data plugs for this site, an analysis of the wind resource was developed using Windographer 1.21. No data quality analysis was performed for this data other than what was available from the flag data fields included in the data. The suspect data was first removed from the collected data. Windographer was then used to add in synthetic data to these intervals with suspect data. The Windographer files (with blanks for the suspect data and with the blanks filled with synthetic data) are given below:

• UND_Aurora_2003_0409_to_2004_0628.windog
• Aurora_2003_0409_to_2004_0628_with_blanks_filled.windog
• Aurora_2003_0409_to_2004_0628_with_blanks_filled.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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