PROGRAM INFORMATION

BRANSON - 7/21/2009 through 11/13/2010

 CSU ALP Install Team (from left): Derrick Benallie, Jake Renquist, Eric Rasbach, Nick Wagner, Mike Kostrzewa, Doug Hopper, and Daniel Fink.

DATA DETAILS

July 21, 2009 through November 13, 2010:

The anemometer tower was installed on July 21, 2009 and removed on November 13, 2010. The site is located just south of U. S. Highway 160 in Las Animas County east of Trinidad and about 11.4 miles NE of Branson. The site is flat in all directions with no obstructions within at least 1/2 mile.

All data was collected using an NRG #40 anemometer and NRG #200 Wind Vane mounted on a tilt-up tower located at a height of 30m. 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 +354° 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 6 hours was deleted

Windographer was then used to add in synthetic data to these intervals with suspect data. The summary report, 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:

• Branson_3703_2009_0721_to_2010_1113_Summary_Report.pdf
• Branson_3703_2009_0721_to_2010_1113_without_data_validation.windog
• Branson_3703_2009_0721_to_2010_1113_without_data_validation.txt
• Branson_3703_2009_0721_to_2010_1113_with_data_validation_offset_354.windog
• Branson_3703_2009_0721_to_2010_1113_with_data_validation_offset_354.txt

Final Wind Resource Summary

Highlights of the wind resource for the entire recording period from July 21, 2009 through November 13, 2010 are given 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. 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.

IMPORTANT: No turbine losses are included in the power, energy, and capacity factor values in the table. Typically, turbine losses can be 5-20% to account for maintenance downtime, icing/soiling and losses from other turbines in a wind farm. Users wanting to be conservative in the performance projections should multiply the power, energy, and capacity values by (1- % losses) to account for these losses.

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