PROGRAM INFORMATION

WEST WALSENBURG #2

08/18/2005 through 11/17/2006

DATA DETAILS

August 18, 2005 through November 17, 2006:

This tower is the sole 50m anemometer tower owned by the Governor's Energy Office. It is intended for community wind projects. Funding for the site came from San Isabel Electric Association, Inc. and the Governor's Energy Office. The anemometer tower was installed in August 18, 2005. The original 20-meter tower at the West Walsenburg site was removed and replaced with this 50-meter tower. Because of more sensors and measurement heights, the site was given a new name, West Walsenburg #2. The site was located approximately 10 miles northwest of the town of Walsenburg. Two miles to the north is the Huerfano River which is oriented in a west-to-east direction. The vegetation around the site is primarily grassland and brush.

Data was collected using four (4) NRG #40 Anemometers and two (2) NRG #200P Wind Vanes, as follows:

• Anemometers
  1. 50 meters facing West
  2. 49 meters facing South
  3. 40 meters facing West
  4. 30 meters facing South
• Wind Vanes
  1. 50 meters facing North
  2. 40 meters facing North

There was also a temperature sensor at a height of 3 meters.

All sensors fed into an NRG Symphonie data logger. The data logger generated wind report files for each day. Data files were sent into the Governor's Energy Office and then to the University of North Dakota for analysis. For this data, UND applied an offset of +322° to the wind vane data. However, the wind vane at 40m appears to have never worked properly and the wind vane at 50m appears to have failed on about July 14, though the data for much of 2006 appears suspect. Thus, some of the wind data should be viewed skeptically. A zipped file that contains all of the NRG raw data files, and the the corrected data and wind resource summary report from UND are available here:

• West_Walsenburg_2_NRG_2005_0818_to_2006_1117.zip
• UND_West_Walsenburg_2_2005_0818_to_2006_1117.txt
• West_Walsenburg_2_Wind_Resource_Summary_Report_2005_0818_to_2006_1117.pdf

CSU was chosen as the contractor for the program on September 14, 2007. From this data, an analysis of the wind resource report was developed using Windographer 1.21. From anecdotal evidence provided by Mr. Tim Olsen, the wind data appears to be wrongly offset by 180°. Thus, for this data, an offset of +322° - 180° = 142° was applied to the 50m wind vane data and the bad wind vane data from July 14, 2006 through 11/17/2006 was removed. No data quality analysis was performed on this data. The Windographer file and the exported text file from Windographer are given below:

• West_Walsenburg_2_2005_0818_to_2006_1117_bad_WD50_removed_offset_142.windog
• West_Walsenburg_2_2005_0818_to_2006_1117_bad_WD50_removed_offset_142.txt

Wind Resource Summary

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

Note that this wind rose is only for the 50m wind vane and includes only the data from 2005.

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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