PROGRAM INFORMATION

Colorado ALP Sites and Wind Data

When accessing the wind data from this site, it is important to understand that much of the data was originally processed and posted by the Plains Organization For Wind Energy Resources (POWER) program through the Energy & Environmental Research Center at the University of North Dakota. POWER processed the raw wind data from all sites prior to June 30, 2007 and posted the raw data and wind resource summary reports at their site until April 2008. All raw data collected is either from NRG Wind Explorer dataloggers or Symphonie dataloggers.

CSU took over as contractor for the ALP program in September 2007 and is now responsible for the wind resource analysis. At that time, there were nine 20m and 30m anemometer towers in the field (Delta, Elizabeth, Fort Collins, Holyoke, Lamar #2, Mount Princeton, Seibert, Victor, and Villa Grove). In addition to these sites, data was also being collected from 30m towers owned by San Isabel Electric Association at three sites in the Walsenburg area: Walsenburg Airport - North a.k.a Potts (No. 44), Walsenburg Airport - South a.k.a Mapes (No. 46), and Plavic Mesa (No. 49). There was also a 50m tower installed through the GEO's Community Wind program in cooperation with Baca Green Energy at Stonington, near Walsh (No. 51). With the exception of the Delta, Mount Princeton, and Stonington sites, some data from these sites were sent to POWER for processing and was available from the POWER site. But the latest data from these sites was processed by the CSU ALP program.

For the Delta, Mount Princeton, and Stonington sites, no data had been processed by POWER and these sites have been processed solely by the CSU ALP program, as have the new tower sites starting with the site at Schriever AFB (No. 53). We also started numbering the sites sequentially starting with this site. Thus, the Schriever AFB site (No. 53) was installed before the Durango site (No. 54).

There is a little difference in the processing of the data between the POWER program and the CSU ALP. The POWER program processed the data using the WindPro software and provided a data quality flag field in the data to note instances in the data where the data was suspect. You can find more information of the data here.

At CSU, we're using Windographer to process the raw wind data. With this software, we can provide more graphic representation of the data and we can also match up the wind data with turbine manufacturer's performance curves to get an estimate of the wind energy that could be generated at the site.

Thus, for a given site listed below the data and summary reports provided could be from the now-defunct POWER site, from the CSU ALP, or from some combination of the two.

If you wish to read the raw data plug files, you should download either the Wind Data Retriever software (that reads just Wind Explorer data plug files) or the Symphonie Data Retriever Software (that reads both Symphonie data files and Wind Explorer data plug files) from the NRG Solutions site. Currently, all sites use the Wind Explorer data logger except the Sheep Mountain- Usry Ranch site (No. 62) that uses a Symphonie data logger.

A word about datum:

A Garmin E-Trex GPS is used to determine and report the GPS coordinates for the current sites.  It was passed along from the previous contractor and so it is likely that all of the sites used this GPS.  The GPS is set to the default datum which is WGS 84 (World Geodetic Survey, 1984). 

On the website pages, the GPS coordinates are reported using this datum.  These GPS coordinates are used to determine the township and range and to find topographic maps to report on the website. The topo maps are downloaded from the USGS website and these tend to show NAD27 datum on USGS quadrangles, but often the projection uses NAD83 datum.

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