The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) are continuing to work toward better integrating new wind turbines with their local environment. One barrier to wind energy installations has been the concern that wind turbines may impact the National Air Space (NAS) radar system. This concern has led to a blanket rejection of several wind farm developments in areas close to NAS radar systems. In an effort to improve the siting and permitting process for wind energy developers looking to build projects within the vicinity of radar systems, SNL is working with BEM International and Peak Spatial Enterprises to develop a Tool for Siting Planning and Encroachment Analysis for Renewables (TSPEAR) toolkit.
The TSPEAR toolkit supports energy developers that wish to design, analyze, and track the progress of wind energy projects. Initially designed to support wind energy development by assessing the interaction between turbines and constraining factors, such as the NAS radar systems, TSPEAR is partially populated with information from existing databases and can integrate custom models and tools used throughout the development process.
TSPEAR includes a graphical user interface that allows developers to combine commercial planning/management capabilities with a model that contains common air route surveillance radars within the contiguous United States (CONUS), airport surveillance radar within the CONUS, and a line-of-sight analysis tool. Combining these resources, TSPEAR allows a developer to evaluate the impacts their proposed project may have on radar systems prior to submitting specific plans for development to government agencies for approval.
SNL is working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory to validate the results of TSPEAR against the Interagency Field Test and Evaluation experimental campaigns that measured radar performance over and around several wind farms.
Additionally, SNL plans to further develop TSPEAR to include models of a suite of mitigation technologies for projects that are found to have an impact on a nearby radar system to enable them to evaluate potential options for moving forward with development.