Award Number: DE-EE0008727
CX(s) Applied: A9, B3.3, B3.
Wind Energy Technologies Office
Location(s): CA
Office(s): Golden Field Office

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is proposing to provide funding to Electric Power Research Organization (EPRI) to design, develop, and test a novel wind energy curtailment system (i.e., the Turbine Integrated Mortality Reduction (TIMR) system) designed to reduce bat mortality rates and reduce economic losses associated with traditional curtailment techniques. The system would be composed of custom hardware/software that would process, in real-time: 1) acoustic data, which would be auto-classified into bat and non-bat calls; and 2) wind speed data, which would communicate real-time risk conditions to a wind operator’s supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. Utilizing this data, the TIMR system and SCADA system would automatically curtail/reinitiate energy production based on risk conditions for bat mortality. The system, composed of both sound detection hardware (i.e., microphone systems on wind turbine nacelles) and software to be integrated into a SCADA system, would be installed/integrated at an existing wind utility site.