Learn more about Wind

As wind turbines and plant sizes grow, is there a point at which costs plateau? Researchers analyze the avg cost per megawatt to develop and maintain offshore wind plants—and how these could change if trends toward larger turbines and plants continue.

The Fall 2021 edition of R&D News highlights efforts by DOE national laboratories and industry partners to deploy wind energy across the United States.

SEER, the U.S. Offshore Wind Synthesis of Environmental Effects Research, is designed to shed light on the environmental effects of offshore wind development, identify existing gaps in information, and prioritize future environmental research efforts.

The National Rotor Testbed is an open platform for testing new wind turbine technologies and collaborating among national laboratories to validate advanced computational models for wind turbines. The platform now includes wake control research.

Various energy industry stakeholders are calling for interconnection queue reform. While many projects that apply for interconnection are never built, data from these queues nonetheless provide a glimpse of the types of projects under development.

Distributed wind energy systems have unique characteristics, such as likely threats, geography, stakeholders, risk tolerance, and mitigations. A multilaboratory research team is using resilience metrics to evaluate the benefits of distributed wind.

Offshore wind research buoys are equipped with instruments that can take wind speed measurements as high as 250 meters—the height of today’s wind turbines. Results will help wind power plant operators make funding and siting decisions.

Weather models have difficulty forecasting the cold, near-ground temperatures in cold pools, resulting in subtle errors that have a big impact on the magnitude and timing of wind power predictions. A new method can cut wind speed errors by as much as 20%.