PROGRAM INFORMATION

PALISADE - 5/21/2008 through 8/7/2009

DATA DETAILS

May 21, 2008 to August 7, 2009:

The anemometer tower was installed on May 21, 2008. The site is located in an peach orchard about 2 miles east of Palisade near the entrance to Debeque Canyon. The site is on an elevated jut of land just below a larger mesa and near a much larger mesa to the east with sheer walls. The wind tends to come up and down Debeque Canyon and is expected to have significant thermal winds.

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 to the Colorado ALP at Colorado State University 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.

Using this data, an analysis of the wind resource report was developed using Windographer 1.45. For this data an offset of +3° was applied to the wind vane data. For this report, a data quality 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 3 hours or more was deleted.
2. Any wind direction data where the wind direction varied by less than 3 degrees over 5 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 the data quality analysis), and the Windographer files (with and without the data quality analysis) are given below:

• Palisade_3908_2008_0521_to_2009_0807_without_data_validation.windog
• Palisade_3908_2008_0521_to_2009_0807_without_data_validation.txt
• Palisade_3908_2008_0521_to_2009_0807_with_data_validation_offset_3.windog
• Palisade_3908_2008_0521_to_2009_0807_with_data_validation_offset_3.txt

Final Wind Resource Summary

The anemometer tower was removed from the site on August 7, 2009. 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 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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