Planning for Serious Wind Energy Development in Nevada and the Southwest

"Free as the wind." It's a cliché that summarizes both the potential and the dilemma facing the future of this renewable energy resource. If you can catch the breeze, it's yours to use. But you have to be there when it's happening to take advantage of it.

To make a serious contribution to America's energy budget, wind energy developments will need to be constructed on a commercial scale that emulates or exceeds the expanse of the projects at San Giorgino Pass, Tehachapi Pass, or Altamont Pass in California-among the biggest in the country with each generating more than 500 megawatts [(MW) one MW will light up about 250 average American homes].

Wind energy is still a very small fraction of the U.S. energy budget (just under one percent of the estimated 450,000 MW demand in 2001), but it is the fastest growing area of new energy development, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

Nevada and the Desert Southwest have abundant wind resources, but the mountainous nature of the region makes siting a wind farm for capturing this resource a major challenge. DRI is the lead institution in a new research project that will develop a method of identifying the best sites for an emerging wind generation technology called Low Wind Speed Turbines (LWST), a system using very tall towers with enormous blades that rotate at fairly slow speeds.

Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the project includes scientists from the University of Nevada campuses in Reno and Las Vegas and Distributive Generation Systems, Inc. Dr. Richard Reinhardt, a DRI atmospheric physicist who is the project's principal investigator, said the overall objective of this project is to advance the deployment of LWST and other emerging wind power technologies in Nevada and the Southwest.

"Because of its complex topography, finding optimum sites for wind power turbines is quite challenging in the Southwest, and Nevada in particular, Reinhardt says. "The specific objective for this project is to demonstrate that it is possible to create detailed wind resource maps with extensive site-specific wind energy data.

"This will be accomplished by initiating a program that combines high temporal (time scale) resolution meteorological and multi-height wind speed and direction measurements, database development, a wide range of statistical analyses, and a set of three-dimensional, time-dependent predictive models," says Reinhardt.

Reinhardt points out that wind turbine systems now on the drawing board include towers soaring above 300 feet, with giant turbine blades reaching half again as high, to grab the passing breeze. A serious wind farm in a fairly remote Nevada location might include hundreds of towers and turbines all generating in excess of 1,000 MW of electrical power. The critical factor is finding the optimal locations. "We want sites that are on public land, reasonably near highways and major power lines, but not too close to population areas."

DRI's remote sensing and geographical information systems scientist Tim Minor will be working with colleagues from the University of Nevada, Reno and resources from the U.S. Bureau of Mines and Geology and NREL, to identify sites for testing wind conditions. Using Minor's information, four sites will be identified this spring where 50-meter towers holding meteorological equipment will be erected.

Dr. Mark Green, a DRI specialist in remotely sensing atmospheric phenomena, will establish two SODAR (sonic detection and ranging) sites-one on a mountaintop and one in a valley-bouncing high frequency sound waves off moving air layers to describe wind motion at various elevations overhead.

Dr. Darko Koracin, a DRI physicist who specializes in developing and applying predictive models of wind, turbulence, and atmospheric dispersion on regional and mesoscale levels, will be responsible for developing a wind model that takes into account the variability of the terrain across Nevada and the vagaries of the weather. He will be working with Dr. Darrell Pepper and his colleagues from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who will develop more localized "microscale" models for determining exact location of instruments and wind turbines.

Reinhardt says the information and siting data developed in the project will be made available to the government, the wind energy industry, and the general public. "In addition to our project reports and computer models submitted to NREL, we will also be placing siting location materials on the website of DRI's Western Regional Climate Center (WRCC), which is a very active site receiving more than 1.25 million visitors a month. We will be emulating the data dissemination approach used for DRI's Community Environmental Monitoring Project on the WRCC web pages, with site-specific information for firms or individuals who want to begin developing wind energy resources."

Nevada is the basic testing pad for the modeling approach, Reinhardt says, but the potential is as large as that of wind power itself. "The success of this approach for Nevada will assure applicability in the rest of the Southwest. We hope we can remove a basic uncertainty that has kept wind power from fully realizing its potential."

-John Doherty