2015 Key Wind Program and National Laboratory Accomplishments

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Wind Program is committed to helping the nation secure cost-competitive sources of renewable energy through the development and deployment of innovative wind power technologies. By investing in improvements to wind plant design, technology development, and operation as well as developing tools to identify the highest quality wind resources, the Wind Program serves as a leader in making wind energy technologies more competitive with traditional sources of energy and a larger part of our nation’s renewable energy portfolio.

In 2015, DOE published a new Wind Vision report that analyzes the potential for wind power to provide 20% of the nation's electricity demand by 2030 and 35% by 2050. Wind Vision: A New Era for Wind Power in the United States is the culmination of a 2-year collaborative effort by more than 250 experts from industry, government, and academia. It is one of the many examples of how DOE's Wind Program provides a nucleus for the research community, bringing together its many diverse stakeholders to achieve a common goal—powering the nation's energy revolution through wind evolution.

In support of the President’s all-of-the above energy strategy, in May 2015, DOE released Enabling Wind Power Nationwide, a report showing how the United States can unlock the vast potential for wind energy deployment in all 50 states—made possible through the next-generation of larger wind turbines. The new report highlights the potential for technical advancements to unlock wind resources in regions with limited wind deployment today, such as the Southeast. These new regions represent an additional 700,000 square miles—or about one-fifth of the United States—bringing the total area of technical wind potential to 1.8 million square miles.

Under its Atmosphere to Electrons (A2e) initiative, DOE works with its national laboratories, industry, and academia to gain a better understanding of the Earth's atmospheric boundary layer—the turbulent region of air that extends from the Earth's surface up to a few kilometers that drives the wind plant—and how it impacts wind plant performance.

In 2015, DOE announced that five of its national laboratories will lead in implementing a new $20 million Small Business Vouchers Pilot, a public-private partnership that will connect clean energy innovators across the country with top-notch scientists, engineers, and world-class facilities. With this federal funding, more than 100 small businesses will receive vouchers so they can access considerable lab expertise and tools that will help them test, validate, and introduce new products, expand their businesses, and grow the clean energy sector.

As part of its effort to plan the funding for its future short- and long-term research and development efforts, the Wind Program hosted an Executive Summit in November 2015 that brought together members of the wind industry community and DOE's national laboratories to focus on investments and technology transfer as they apply to wind energy technology research, development, deployment, and demonstration.

According to the 2014 Wind Technologies Market Report produced by Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, since the late 1990s, the average nameplate capacity of wind turbines installed in the United States has increased by 172% to 1.9 megawatts in 2014. Also, the average turbine hub height has increased by 48% to 83 meters, and the average rotor diameter has increased by 108% to 99 meters. This scaling has enabled wind energy developers to build projects more economically at sites with lower wind speeds. (Photo by Dennis Schroeder / NREL)

In 2015, the DOE Wind Program assembled a team of that explored new ways of collecting data on atmospheric turbulence and winds at a higher time resolution than is currently considered by the wind energy industry. They also validated microwave radiometer measurements of temperature profiles against established standards. Comparing measurements from scanning lidars and radars to each other and to those on the Boulder Atmospheric Observatory 300-meter meteorological tower, the team assessed new sophisticated approaches for measuring winds and turbulence and quantified measurement uncertainty.

A team led by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory built and commissioned a new medium-speed drivetrain that is expected to increase reliability, improve efficiency, and significantly reduce the cost of wind energy. The new drivetrain weighs significantly less than current designs to facilitate easier installation on taller towers and requires fewer of the expensive, hard-to-come-by rare earth magnets.

Researchers at DOE's Argonne National Laboratory have characterized the leading cause of drivetrain component failures using the Advanced Photon Source, a user facility at DOE's Office of Science and the brightest synchrotron X-ray source in the western hemisphere. Scientists and wind equipment manufacturing experts use this $1-billion facility to shine the Advanced Photo Source's light beam at failed turbine components to look deep inside the material to locate microscopic cracks within the steel bearings, thereby furthering our understanding of these premature failures.

As part of the Atmosphere to Electrons initiative, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) developed a 3-year collaborative research plan to develop and field test wind turbine controls. New control systems, such as the advanced feedforward control system that incorporates lidar and is currently under development at NREL, will help researchers improve simulations and increase the understanding of the physics impacting wind plant performance. The plan developed by the two laboratories identified collaborative field testing of wind plant controls at SNL's Scaled Wind Farm Technology (SWiFT) Facility.

The researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed the Sandia Wake-Imaging-System (SWIS) that enables them to map the invisible turbulent wakes formed by wind turbines and show developers how to site their turbines, increase power production, and reduce costs. The system uses cameras, a portable aerosol-particle generator on a lift, and a laser-light sheet carefully configured between two wind turbines at the Scaled Wind Farm Technology facility in Lubbock, Texas, to produce a motion picture of wind turbine wake formation and development.

The high-quality experimental data collected by the new National Rotor Testbed at the Scaled Wind Farm Technology (SWiFT) facility will meet the needs of the wind energy industry for years to come. The facility is ideally suited for the atmosphere/aerodynamic experiments needed to achieve ultimate wind plant performance and cost reductions. SWiFT contains a carefully spaced array of three highly instrumented, research-scale wind turbines along with numerous met towers and cutting-edge flow measurements to record mesoscale weather around the turbine array, inflow directly into each turbine, and wake flow from each turbine. The new, sophisticated subscale rotor designed for the testbed is well-suited to support turbine-turbine interaction research at SWiFT and will also represent full-sized turbines. (Photo by Jürgen Winzeck / Siemens AG)

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory collaborated with Siemens to instrument, install, and test state-of-the-art Siemens B53 passive load alleviation blades on the Siemens 2.3-megawatt wind turbine at the National Wind Technology Center. Passive load alleviation means that the curved flexible shape of the blades enables them to deflect large loads caused by gusts of wind. The 53-meter blades were heavily instrumented with hundreds of surface pressure taps, five-hole pressure probes, and fiber-optic strands that ran from the tip of the blade to its root to measure how this highly flexible blade reacts to the rapidly varying aerodynamic phenomena that occurs in the turbulent atmosphere in which the turbine operates.

Researchers at the National Wind Technology Center developed a feed-forward controller that is able to regulate turbines and wind plants by "looking ahead" at incoming wind conditions and eliminating the delayed control response time that currently exists when the controller senses a wind gust and the mechanical adjustment to the rotor torque responds.

According to the 2014–2015 Offshore Wind Technologies Market Report published by the National Renewable Energy Labroatory in 2015, there are 21 U.S. offshore wind projects in the development pipeline, representing 15,650 MW of offshore wind. Thirteen of these projects, representing 5,939 MW, have achieved site control or a more advanced phase of development. Approximately 3,305 MW of U.S. projects have announced a commercial operation date by 2020, which is consistent with the timing of the deployment scenario defined for offshore wind in DOE's Wind Vision.

To accelerate the development of offshore wind, DOE commissioned Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to procure and deploy two research buoys designed to more accurately predict the power-producing potential of a site. The bright yellow buoys—each worth $1.3 million—were completed at the end of 2014 and include advanced scientific instruments designed to measure wind speed at multiple heights, air and sea surface temperature, barometric pressure, relative humidity, wave height and period, and water conductivity. Subsurface ocean currents are also measured using Doppler sensors.

Farther from shore and at greater depths, floating offshore wind turbine technology can access wind resources that are often higher and more available than in shallower water, and where fixed-bottom structures are more economically challenged. Statoil, an international energy company, took advantage of these unique resources and conditions when it deployed the first spar-based system, known as the Hywind Demo, in 2009. In 2015, the company partnered with NREL to analyze the Hywind technology as it applies to U.S. waters. (Photo by Senu Sirnivas / NREL)

A major part of the offshore wind industry's success depends on efficient and accurate analysis and design to overcome the challenge of the stress to submerged structures caused by continuous ocean waves and currents. To meet this industry-wide need, Sandia National Laboratories has developed tools to accurately assess seabed stability to help minimize risks to offshore wind infrastructure, and help reduce financing, installation, and maintenance costs throughout the structure's lifecycle.

According to the 2014 Distributed Wind Market Report—prepared by researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and in conjunction with DOE's Wind and Water Power Technologies Office in 2015—nearly 74,000 distributed wind turbines are now in operation within the United States, totaling 906 MW of power. Approximately 1,700 units, a $170-million investment, were added in 2014 with installations of largescale turbines (greater than 1 MW) growing almost threefold. (Photo from Windsine Inc.)

Funding provided by DOE's Competitiveness Improvement Project and technical support from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory were key to enabling Pika Energy of Westbrook, Maine, to develop and test its innovative manufacturing process that reduced the end-user cost of its wind turbine by more than $3,000. (Photo from Pika Energy)

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory developed an innovative distributed wind market diffusion model—dWIND—that provides manufacturers, investors, and incentive providers with critical, third-party, unbiased data on the size of the potential market and the cost of energy they need to offer to achieve the desired market growth. It also includes quantitative data that DOE and wind industry stakeholders can use to set targets for cost and performance goals.

Two of the nation's most advanced wind research and test facilities joined forces in 2015 to help the wind energy industry improve the performance of wind turbine drivetrains and comprehend how the turbines can integrate effectively with the electrical grid. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Clemson University are partnering to share resources and capabilities in the operation and development of testing facilities and exchange staff for training, research, and development purposes.

Reliable, long-term, public meteorological data has been proven to be a high-priority need of the wind industry. To that end, DOE installed two 135-meter-tall met towers with research-grade instrumentation at the National Wind Technology Center. After some initial preprocessing and data validation, data from a wide array of sensors are directly published onto a publicly available website. These data are being used by wind energy developers and researchers worldwide to improve the design of wind plants and develop the next generation of wind turbines.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory developed a stable, verified version of an EtherCAT data acquisition system that provides DOE and the wind energy research community with a flexible, highly accurate and reliable data collection tool. The new system is used by researchers at both the National Wind Technology Center (NWTC) in Boulder, Colorado, and the Wind Technology Test Center in Boston, Massachusetts, to view, collect, and process large quantities of blade test data. The system is also used at the NWTC for collecting data on dynamometer tests, wind turbine field tests, and met towers and includes optimized features for those applications.

Hosted at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Energy Collegiate Wind Competition 2015 inspired seven teams of students to stretch their imaginations and use innovative thinking to solve complex wind energy problems. This year's competition took the inaugural Collegiate Wind Competition 2014 to the next level by requiring teams to upgrade their 2014 prototype wind turbines for testing in the National Wind Technology Center's wind tunnel and present a complementary design report. Collegiate Wind Competition 2015 winners included Boise State University with first place, followed by Cal Maritime (second place) and Pennsylvania State (third place).

Sandia National Laboratories has developed the first wind turbine radar interference modeling toolkit to mitigate this potential barrier to deployment. The Tools for Siting, Planning, and Encroachment Analysis for Renewables toolkit enables developers to pinpoint the location of radar equipment, analyze impacts of the proposed wind turbines on that radar, and offer potential alternate locations for those turbines causing the chief problems. As a result, developers can better site and configure wind plants to minimize their detrimental impact on radars, making the airspace safer and more secure while opening more areas to wind development.

For wind to truly succeed as a renewable energy resource it must not only be sustainable and affordable, but operate in harmony with the environment. Finding this balance means understanding potential environmental impacts and investigating demonstrated solutions to those impacts—and ultimately sharing that knowledge with the world. Specifically, these objectives are at the core of International Energy Agency Wind Task 34, otherwise known as WREN (Working Together to Resolve Environmental Effects of Wind Energy). The United States has led WREN since 2012, with support from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (serving as operating agent), and DOE's Wind and Water Power Technologies Office.

Published by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and General Electric Energy Consulting, The Western Wind and Solar Integration Study Phase 3 found that, with good system planning, sound engineering practices, and commercially available technologies, the Western Interconnection can withstand the crucial first minute after large grid disturbances with high penetrations of wind and solar on the grid (e.g., loss of a large power plant or a major transmission line). Acceptable dynamic performance of the grid in the fractions of a second to 1 minute following a large disturbance is critical to system reliability.

Using high-performance computing capabilities and new methodologies, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory conducted the Eastern Renewable Generation Integration Study, modeling hundreds of gigawatts of wind and solar on system operations to examine their impacts on other generation sources such as thermal plants. The study found that the U.S. Eastern Interconnection—one of the largest power systems in the world—can reliably support up to a 30% penetration of wind and solar power.

The steady increase of wind power in the nation's power grid influences prices and incentives in the regional electricity markets. Wind power has a zero marginal production cost that tends to reduce the energy prices in wholesale markets. Moreover, wind power forecast uncertainty may increase the need for operating reserves to maintain system reliability, thereby increasing the prices for reserve products. Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory have investigated the ability of electricity markets with high wind power penetrations to provide price incentives for sufficient capacity investments to maintain system reliability. They concluded that this can be achieved through several market mechanisms, from improved scarcity pricing to capacity markets.

The Wind Integration National Dataset (WIND) Toolkit compiled by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is currently the largest, most complete, publicly available wind power data set in the world. It provides high spatial and temporal resolution wind power, wind power forecast, and met data for a 7-year period at over 126,000 locations throughout the continental United States.