Seattle, United States [RenewableEnergyWorld.com] 3TIER has launched its new Portfolio Climate Variability Analysis (CVA) tool. The application is designed to assist wind energy developers with large networks of met towers to accelerate the decision making process about where to build. By enabling developers to put observational data into a long-term climatological perspective, Portfolio CVA reduces uncertainty about a location’s wind energy value, the company said.
“Portfolio CVA was developed at the request of one of our key customers, Horizon Wind Energy, which has an enormous development pipeline and maintains hundreds of met towers,” said Kenneth Westrick, CEO and founder of 3TIER. “But, when you are doing wind energy assessment on Horizon’s scale, you need a more nimble, scalable solution that enables you to monitor the long-term, climate-adjusted performance of your entire network of sites from month to month.”
Portfolio CVA is automated and can be deployed across portfolios of met towers ranging in size from several to several hundred. Every month Portfolio CVA takes the most recent month’s observational data for each location. It then compares that data to a 10-year-plus numerical weather prediction (NWP) model simulation for each location and returns the raw 10-year-plus, model-run data, as well as the model-run data corrected using the observational data for each location.
This analysis could help developers understand how the wind regime measured during a limited observational period compares to the long-term wind regime that should be expected at the site. As a result, developers are able to predict future megawatt potential and identify the locations with the most robust wind energy.
