AWS Truepower Upgrades Wind Farm Design Software to Refine Uncertainty and Loss Estimates

 “With these latest additions we have listened to what our users are telling us. This is just the first stage of an ongoing rollout of new features aimed at addressing the real needs of wind-farm design," said Nick Robinson, Director of openWind. “This new release will empower our clients with innovative tools to gain more insight in the design phase of their wind farm.”

Key features of openWind Enterprise 1.3 include:

• Effective Turbulence Intensity:  Provides a measure of the fatigue loading on each turbine due to ambient and wake-induced turbulence. Users can calculate effective turbulence values according to the latest amendment to IEC614000-1 (ed. 3), and specify how wakes are modeled.

• Times-Series Energy Capture: Allows users to assess diurnal and seasonal impacts of turbulence intensity and air density as well as temperature variance shutdown losses. By inserting the time-element back into the energy capture analysis, users can more easily see the effects of summer and winter differences as well as different daytime and nighttime stability regimes.

• Time-Scheduling of Turbines: Allows users to switch off individual turbines by time of day or year and switch individual turbines to a different power curve. This is particularly useful when attempting to quantify the impact of grid curtailment; switching to low noise power curves at night in order to meet local regulations; or switching off a turbine for specific times of day during those days of the year for which shadow flicker may be a problem.

“In my view, openWind Enterprise is already the most flexible and powerful tool for turbine layout design and energy capture available today. The addition of Time-Series Energy Capture, in particular, will improve our modeling accuracy and also save us valuable time,” said Erik Hale, Wind Assessment Manager, enXco.

openWind Enterprise software is a wind farm design and optimization software based on the open source version of openWind. Currently there are over 3,500 users of the free community version of openWind. openWind Enterprise was developed for wind developers who need more powerful features -  an industry-leading geographical information systems (GIS) interface, the ability to optimize for cost of energy, assess deep array impacts, define and analyze strategies for managed shut-down of turbines. 

AWS Truepower is previewing version 1.3 of openWind Enterprise at the AWEA Wind Resource & Project Energy Assessment Seminar in Seattle, WA, December 14-15, 2011. For more information, about this product and the release visit http://www.awstruepower.com/openwind_ad1211/.