PROGRAM INFORMATION

EAST WALSENBURG

11/01/2004 through 02/21/2006

DATA DETAILS

November 1, 2004 through February 21, 2006:

This anemometer tower was installed on Novmber 1, 2004. The site was approximately 26.5 miles east of the town of Walsenburg and 35 miles east of the Rocky Mountains. The terrain is rugged with the Apishapa Canyon located within a mile of the site. Vegetation is primarily grasses with trees and brush growing in the draws and nearby canyons.

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. Data plugs were sent into the Governor's Energy Office and then to the University of North Dakota for analysis. The 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.

For this data, UND applied an offset of +348° to the wind vane data. The file includes suspect data and when that data occurs, there is also a flag field that indicates these suspect data values. A version of this wind data with blanks where the data is suspect, along with the corrected data and the UND wind resource summary report are available here:

• East_Walsenburg_2004_1101_to_2006_0221_with_blanks.txt
• UND_East_Walsenburg_2004_1101_to_2006_0221.txt
• East_Walsenburg_Wind_Resource_Summary_Report_2004_1101_to_2006_0221.pdf

CSU was chosen as the contractor for the program on September 14, 2007. Using the raw data from the UND corrected data, 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 are given below:

• UND_East_Walsenburg_2004_1101_to_2006_0221.windog
• East_Walsenburg_2004_1101_to_2006_0221_with_blanks_filled.windog
• East_Walsenburg_2004_1101_to_2006_0221_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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