PROGRAM INFORMATION

SOUTH FORK - 7/18/2005 through 2/21/2006

DATA DETAILS

July 18, 2005 through February 21, 2006:

The anemometer tower was installed on July 18, 2005. The site was located on the east side of the town of South Fork. The town of South Fork is situated at the junction of the South Fork and Rio Grande Rivers. The tower was located at the base of Beaver Mountain, which has a peak elevation of 11,529 feet. The site has poor exposure to north and south winds due to the mountain (due south) and buildings (due north).

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.

Note that the wind direction sensor was not functioning correctly during the entire measurement period.

For this data, UND applied an offset of +220° to the wind vane data, but the wind vane was installed incorrectly and did not record the wind direction properly and should be disregarded. The corrected data and wind resource summary report are available here:

• UND_South_Fork_2005_0718_to_2006_0221.txt
• South_Fork_Wind_Resource_Summary_Report_2005_0718_to_2006_0214.pdf

CSU was chosen as the contractor for the program on September 14, 2007. From the UND data, an analysis of the wind resource was developed using Windographer 1.13. For this data, an offset of +98° was already applied by UND to the wind vane data. 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_South_Fork_2005_0718_to_2006_0221_with_blanks.windog
• UND_South_Fork_2005_0718_to_2006_0221_with_blanks.txt
• UND_South_Fork_2005_0718_to_2006_0221_with_filled_blanks.windog
• UND_South_Fork_2005_0718_to_2006_0221_with_filled_blanks.txt

Complete Wind Resource Summary

The anemometer tower was removed from the site on February 21, 2006. Highlights of the wind resource at this site for the entire data collection period using the Windographer 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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