Towers, Fiats & Humvees

The difference between a prospecting meteorological mast and a permanent “met’’ tower is like the difference between a Fiat and a Humvee.  All aspects of a permanent met tower are more durable, providing higher uptime and more reliable data.    

Prospecting towers are not permanent met towers.  Prospecting drives an inexpensive 1-3 year campaign to assess a site’s suitability for a wind farm and to build a case for project finance investors.  A short 60 meter tilt-up pipe prospecting tower is a temporary, ‘toe in the water’.  It is cheap, but sacrifices hub height accuracy.  

A permanent met tower provides high-quality, high?reliability data to support operations and power trading over a 20-30 year project life.  A permanent met tower requires a different standard of durability and reliability in sensors, power supply, and communications.

A permanent tower satisfies emerging regulatory pressures for better forecasts such as FERC’s Variable Generation NoPR, price incentives from Midwest ISO’s Dispatchable Intermittent tariff and PPA terms from TVA.  Whether meeting a regulatory directive, tariff incentive, or contract obligation, forecasting requires real-time, on-site data.  Data from a permanent tower drives better forecasts and raises confidence as operators bid their output into the day-ahead or even intra-day market.

A permanent met tower is a substantial construction project and management responsibility.  All of WindPole’s 80+ meter guyed towers are already in place, so we use the same towers whether for short-term prospecting or long-term operations.  Using operations grade sensors, power, and communications, WindPole leverages a fleet of existing towers to provide data for the long term. Check to see if we already have a tower on your site.  Call our tower asset manager at 617-528-9915 or look at our tower asset database at map.windpole.com. 

Later this week, we’ll go deep into the power and communications requirements of permanent met towers.