Observations of Wind Farm Atmosphere Interactions within the American Wake Experiment (AWAKEN)
Authors
Patrick Moriarty — National Renewable Energy Laboratory *
Nicola Bodini — National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Lexie Goldberger — Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Thomas Herges — Sandia National Laboratories
Colleen Kaul — Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Raghavendra Krishnamurthy — Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Stefano Letizia — National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Rob K Newsom — Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Andy Scholbrock — National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Sonia Wharton — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Category
ARM field campaigns – Results from recent ARM field campaigns
Description
The American Wake Experiment (AWAKEN) is a collaborative project between the Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) funded laboratories and universities and the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) at wind farm sites near the ARM Southern Great Plains (SGP) facility. The project aims to improve the understanding of wind farm atmospheric interactions and their impact on wind farm performance and the local environment.
In addition to long-term observations from existing SGP facilities, the AWAKEN project involves the deployment of an ARM mobile facility with scanning lidar systems to measure the wind flow and turbulence within and around the wakes of wind turbines, thermodynamic profiling systems to observe the temperature profiles upstream and downstream of wind farms, and energy balance and flux stations to measure the change of these properties near the surface around the wind farms. These instruments are deployed in conjunction with additional instruments from the EERE-funded portion of the project at 13 different field sites and on five different operational wind turbines.
This suite of instruments represents the largest deployment of sensors to date for observations of wind farm atmosphere interactions. The data collected from the AWAKEN project will be used to validate numerical models of wind farm atmosphere interaction and improve the understanding of wind turbine wake dynamics under a variety of atmospheric and wind farm operating conditions.
Of interest for AWAKEN researchers is the prevalence of low-level jets and their impact on wind farm performance due to increased wake losses and propagation distance and as well as changing momentum transport between the wind farm and atmosphere. The greater atmospheric community is also interested in the potential of wind farm wakes to impact observations of the SGP facility themselves, which may bias comparisons to these widely used data. This poster will provide several examples of low-level jet occurrences and their impact on the wakes, wind farm performance and the potential impact on the local environment including existing SGP observations.
Lead PI
Patrick Moriarty — National Renewable Energy Laboratory