PROGRAM INFORMATION

HORSEFLY MESA - 9/20/2011 to 10/17/2012

Install Team (from right): Andrew Costinett (CSU), Will Clapsadl (Ouray County Facilities), and Mike Kostrzewa (taking picture).

DATA DETAILS

September 20, 2011 through October 17, 2012:

The anemometer tower was installed on September 20, 2011 and removed on October 17, 2012. The site was located on Horsefly Mesa in the Cornerstone development overlooking the Uncomphagre Valley. The site was located in a pasture on a saddle between two hills to the NW and the SE. This spot was believed to have good access to wind, particularly from the SW.

All data was collected using an NRG #40 Calibrated Anemometer and NRG #200 Wind Vane. The certification for the anemometer is as follows:

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.

Using this data, an analysis of the wind resource report was developed using Windographer 2.4.6. For this data an offset of +80° was applied to the wind vane data. 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 0.5 m/s and the temperature was below 0°C for 3 hours.
2. Any wind direction data where the wind direction varied by less than 3 degrees for 8 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 (with and without the validation analysis), and the Windographer files (with and without the validation analysis) are given below:

• Horsefly_Mesa_3800_2011_0920_to_2012_1017_Summary_Report.pdf
• Horsefly_Mesa_3800_2011_0920_to_2012_1017_without_data_validation.windog
• Horsefly_Mesa_3800_2011_0920_to_2012_1017_without_data_validation.txt
• Horsefly_Mesa_3800_2011_0920_to_2012_1017_with_data_flagged_offset_80.windog
• Horsefly_Mesa_3800_2011_0920_to_2012_1017_with_data_flagged_offset_80.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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