PROGRAM INFORMATION

HEREFORD - 12/30/2009 to 4/28/2011

 CSU ALP Install Team (from left): Dan Fink, Jake Renquist, Eric Rasbach, Todd Mac Donald, Nathan Davis, and Mike Kostrzewa (taking picture).

DATA DETAILS

December 30, 2009 through April 28, 2011:

The anemometer tower was installed on December 30, 2009 and removed on April 28, 2011. The site is located in Weld County in an open field about 7.2 miles west of Hereford and about 5.6 miles SW of Carpenter, WY. The site is about 20 miles east of the Ponnequin wind farm near Cheyenne and to the east, the turbines from the Cedar Creek wind farm near Grover about 20 miles away can be seen.

All data is collected using an NRG #40 Calibrated Anemometer and NRG #200 Wind Vane mounted on a tilt-up tower located at a height of 30m. The certification for the anemometer is as follows:

This equipment feeds into an NRG Wind Explorer data logger. All data plugs are being collected by 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 1.49. For this data an offset of +205° was applied to the wind vane data, based on measurements taken during the installation. However, when the measurements were checked again when the tower was being removed, the offest was measured to be +165°. For this report, a 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 6 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. A summary report, the combined data files (with and without the validation analysis), and the Windographer files (with and without the validation analysis) are given below:

• Hereford_4040_2009_1230_to_2011_0428_Summary_Report.pdf
• Hereford_4040_2009_1230_to_2011_0428_without_data_validation.windog
• Hereford_4040_2009_1230_to_2011_0428_without_data_validation.txt
• Hereford_4040_2009_1230_to_2011_0428_with_data_validation_offset_165.windog
• Hereford_4040_2009_1230_to_2011_0428_with_data_validation_offset_165.txt

Final Wind Resource Summary

Highlights of the final wind resource at this site 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. 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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