PROGRAM INFORMATION

PARK COUNTY SITE 2208 - PLANKINTON RANCH

7/16/2008 through 8/17/2009

DATA DETAILS

This tower was one of five included in a fleet of 60m towers that were installed by E.ON Climate & Renewables for a commercial wind study in Park County. The tower was installed on July 25, 2008 and removed on August 17, 2009. The site is located in an open pasture about 2.6 miles SE of the intersection of U.S. Hwy 287 and CO Hwy 9 south of Fairplay, near the south end of a private airstrip. The site is sheltered to the east by the N/S-oriented Red Hill ridge about one mile away, but otherwise has good access to wind from other directions.

The following commissioning and decommissioning files were available from Park County:

• Plankinton_Ranch_2208_20080716_Commission.xls
• Plankinton_Ranch_2208_20090313_Maintenance_v02.xls
• Plankinton_Ranch_2208_20090817_Decommission.xls

In summary, data was collected initially using using three (3) NRG #40 Anemometers, three (3) Second Wind #C3 anemometers, and two (2) NRG #200P Wind Vanes, as follows:

• Anemometers
  1. NRG #40 (S/N 68399) at 58.5 meters heading 165° on a 68" boom
  2. NRG #40 (S/N 68372) at 40 meters heading 165° on a 68" boom
  3. NRG #40 (S/N 68358) at 20 meters heading 165° on a 90" boom
  4. Second Wind #C3 (S/N 5246) at 58.5 meters heading 345° on a 68" boom
  5. Second Wind #C3 (S/N 5241) at 40 meters heading 345° on a 68" boom
  6. Second Wind #C3 (S/N 5242) at 20 meters heading 345° on a 90 " boom
• Wind Vanes
  1. NRG #200 P at 56.5 meters heading 345° on a 68" boom with the null point facing toward the tower
  2. NRG #200 P at 18.5 meters heading 345° on a 90 " boom with the null point facing toward the tower

There was also an NRG 110S temperature sensor and an NRG BP-20 pressure sensor (S/N 18055261) at a height of 3 meters and voltmeter in the data logger box..

All sensors fed into an NRG Symphonie data logger. The certifications for the anemometers are as follows:

After about eight months, the three NRG anemometers were replaced on March 13, 2009 by three Second Wind #C3 anemometers. The existing Second Wind anemometers were also replaced. The replacement anemometer serial numbers and certifications are given in the tables below:

The data logger generated wind reports for each day. Using the Symphonie Data Retriever software, each day's data was complied into one large data file, using the appropriate anemometer slope and offset before and after replacement. A zipped file that contains all of the NRG data files and a text version of the aggregate data for all days are given below.

It is important to note that these are the raw files DO NOT include the offsets for the wind vanes so some compensation is required.

Experienced users may also wish to download the site file used to process the raw data with the Symphonie Data Retriever software. You can find the site file for the first period with the NRG and Second Wind anemometers here and the site file for the second period with just Second Wind anemometers here.

Using this data, an analysis of the wind resource report was developed using Windographer 1.45. For this data an offset of +165° was applied to both wind vane data. fields. Since the data set contains data for two or more wind speed sensors at different heights above the ground, Windographer considered the wind shear relationship between different wind speed sensors to synthesize missing data for those wind speed sensors. A best fit using the power law profile was chosen to synthesize the data. Once the wind shear relation was chosen, a daily influence on the wind shear profile was considered so that in each time step where the wind speed is known at one height but not at a different height, Windographer estimated the unknown wind speed based on the best-fit wind shear profile for the appropriate hour of the day.

Using this data, an analysis of the wind resource report was developed using Windographer 1.45. For this report, a data quality analysis was performed on the data. This data was filtered two ways:

1. Any wind speed data (from any anemometer) where the wind speed was less than 1 m/s at a temperature less than 2°C for 4 hours or more was deleted.
2. Any wind direction data (from any wind vane) where the wind direction varied by less than 2 degrees at a temperature less than 2°C for 4 hours or more was deleted.

Windographer was then used to add in synthetic data to these intervals with suspect data.

A summary report, the combined data files, and the Windographer files (with and without the data quality analysis) are given below:

• Plankinton_Ranch_2208_2008_0716_to_2009_0817_Summary_Report.pdf
• Plankinton_Ranch_2208_2008_0716_to_2009_0817_without_data_validation.windog
• Plankinton_Ranch_2208_2008_0716_to_2009_0817_with_data_validation_offset_165.windog
• Plankinton_Ranch_2208_2008_0716_to_2009_0817_with_data_validation_offset_165.txt

Final Wind Resource Summary

Highlights of the wind resource at this site for the data collection period to date are shown below:

For more information Contact Us!