PROGRAM INFORMATION

PAONIA - 08/06/2004 through 08/10/2005

DATA DETAILS

August 6, 2004 through August 10, 2005:

The anemometer tower was installed on August 6, 2004. The site was approximately 3/4 mile north of the town of Paonia. The tower was located next to a campground. The sensors were mounted approximately 30 feet below the top of the tower. A small wind turbine was installed at the top of the tower. Trees and buildings surround 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.

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.

Also, it appears that the wind vane sensor may have failed because most of the time, the wind direction was heading about 90 degrees.

For this data, UND applied an offset of +200 degrees to the wind vane data. This corrected data and wind resource summary report are available here:

• UND_Paonia_2004_0806_to_2005_0810.txt
• Paonia_Wind_Resource_Summary_Report_2004_0806_to_2005_0810.pdf

From both the UND data, an analysis of the wind resource report was developed using Windographer 1.13. For this data, an offset of +200 degrees was applied to the wind vane data. You can find the Windographer file below:

• UND_Paonia_2004_0806_to_2005_0810.windog

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.

For more information Contact Us!