Wind Energy Forecaster A Web-based Wind Energy Prediction Tool Aditya Trivedi ’16 Advisor: Dr. Eric Larson

 Wind is fast growing source of energy  Potential to grow even more  Poorly understood by the public  Growth of wind will impact the grid  Thus, a need to inform the public and accurately predict wind energy generation Motivation and Background

 Web application to predict electricity generation from wind energy  Two main functions  Electricity generation at existing farms  User inputs LOCATION and DISTANCE  Potential for generation at arbitrary locations  User inputs LOCATION and program uses pre-determined input Application Summary

 Determine a list of active wind farms  Determine turbine models installed  Turbine characteristics differ model to model and impact generation  Aggregate farms by models installed  When user makes a query, find all farms within area, get wind forecasts Model – Existing Farms

 Determine land characteristics necessary for wind turbine installations  Decide type of turbines to use  Simulate “farm” by determining spacing of turbines and assuming an area Model – Potential Installations

 USGS Wind Turbine database (farms, turbine models)  Wind Turbine manufacturers  Over 100 different models installed in US  Each is unique!  USGS National Land Cover Database (for potential calculations)  National Weather Service (wind speeds) Data Sources

 Validation!  Compare wind farm output against what the model would have predicted  Determine if sources of error are forecast or model related Further Work

Demonstration