PROGRAM INFORMATION

COALMONT - 5/3/2008 through 1/5/2010

DATA DETAILS

May 3, 2008 to January 5, 2010:

The anemometer tower was installed on May 3, 2008. The site is located about one mile SW of Coalmont. The location is a flat pasture on high ground near the edge of a small overlook to the north and a higher knoll to the west of 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 feds into an NRG Wind Explorer data logger. All data plugs were sent to the Colorado ALP at Colorado State University for analysis. The data plug files and text versions of these files are given below.

Note: The date on all data files is off by one day. The tower was installed on 5/3/2008, but the datalogger was mistakenly set to 5/2/2008. The dates have been changed in the files listed below but not in the raw data files.

Also, note that there is a gap in the data from March 14, 2009 at 4:00 p.m. through April 26, 2009 at 6:00 a.m. due to a loose battery connection.

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.

Using this data, an analysis of the wind resource report was developed using Windographer 1.45. For this data an offset of +280° was applied to the wind vane data. For this report, a data validation analysis was performed on the data. This data was filtered two ways:

1. Any wind speed data where the wind speed was less than 1 mph for 2 hours or more was deleted.
2. Any wind direction data where the wind direction varied by less than 3 degrees over 6 hours was deleted

Windographer was then used to add in synthetic data to these intervals with suspect data. The combined data files (with and without data validation), and the Windographer files (with and without data validation) are given below:

• Coalmont_4006_2008_0502_to_2010_0105_without_data_validation.windog
• Coalmont_4006_2008_0502_to_2010_0105_without_data_validation.txt
• Coalmont_4006_2008_0502_to_2010_0105_with_data_validation_offset_280.windog
• Coalmont_4006_2008_0502_to_2010_0105_with_data_validation_offset_280.txt

Final Wind Resource Summary

The anemometer tower was removed from the site on January 5, 2010. Highlights of the wind resource at this site for the entire monitoring 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 18%. 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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