Existing Wind Data Provides Important Project Foundation
National Wind Assessments, the wind resource analysis division of National Wind, conducted a preliminary study on the existing meteorological data available for Big Stone County, Minnesota. The primary source of this data came from a meteorological tower (met) installed to analyze wind speeds for the 20 megawatt Big Stone Wind, LLC project. Roughly 8 months of data existed from this met tower which is also located within Little Rock Wind’s project area. The wind data available reveals an excellent wind resource.
A met tower is a multi-instrument device which records wind speeds, wind direction, temperature, and air density over time, leading to a complete depiction of the wind attributes of a project site. A minimum of one year of continuous, on-site, wind data is needed for effective site evaluation and wind turbine placement.
“Now we have over a year of wind resource data, surpassing the industry standard, helping us create an extremely accurate picture of the wind regime in the Big Stone County area,” says Kevin Romuld, President of National Wind Assessments.“Typically in our preliminary assessment, we do not have an on-site met tower available to extrapolate data from. We utilize existing weather archives and climatology data or maybe a met tower that is located near the project area, but is essentially outside the footprint. An 80 meter met tower increases the accuracy of the wind data, allowing us to determine the best sites for turbine placement.”
Little Rock Wind will install another meteorological tower this year in order to have the ability to correlate data between two existing meteorological towers. The details collected from the data will help to determine how productive a wind farm will be and where the best wind turbine sites in the footprint are located. This information is the fundamental foundation for project planning, development and financing. For that reason, Little Rock Wind is very fortunate to have an existing meteorological tower.