Technology Assessment & Development

Drought conditions in Oklahoma are getting worse. Even minor drought can stress crops, delay germination, and shrink water supplies. Oklahoma might not have enough water, but it has plenty of wind, and its wind farms are booming.

Now, a massive data collection effort funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Wind Energy Technologies Office could help wind farms across Oklahoma—and the world—increase their energy production with a few strategic moves. Launching March 2022, the American WAKE experiment (or AWAKEN, for short) will capture precise data on how winds shift as they travel from one wind turbine to another or from one wind plant to another. This atmospheric map could help developers adapt their wind plant designs to produce more energy from the same winds, increase profits, and, eventually, reduce electricity prices for consumers.

As the offshore wind industry emerges on the US East Coast, a comprehensive understanding of the wind resource – particularly extreme events – is vital to the industry's success. Such understanding has been hindered by a lack of publicly available wind profile observations in offshore wind energy areas. However, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority recently funded the deployment of two floating lidars within two current lease areas off the coast of New Jersey. These floating lidars provide publicly available wind speed data from 20 to 200m height with a 20m vertical resolution.

The problem of damaged tendon diagnosis (damage detection, damaged tendon identification and damage precise quantification) in a new multibody offshore platform supporting a 10 MW Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (FOWT) is investigated for the first time in this study. Successful operation of the multibody FOWT depends on the integrity of its tendons connecting the upper and lower tanks of the platform. Thus, early diagnosis of the damaged tendons is of high importance and it is achieved through a vibration-based methodology. Damage detection is accomplished based on the detection of changes in the vibration response power spectral density, while damaged tendon identification and damage precise quantification are accomplished through the Functional Model Based Method (FMBM). The FMBM is appropriately formulated in this study to operate with only vibration response signals. The employed vibration responses under healthy and damaged states of the FOWT platform are obtained from a numerical model describing the platform’s dynamics.

Offshore wind and wave power are renewable energy sources that share the marine environment. Collocating these systems can reduce power variability; however, the extent of this differs between sites. Regional differences in combined system variability are investigated.

This paper describes the development of a new reference controller framework for fixed and floating offshore wind turbines that greatly facilitates controller tuning and represents standard industry practices. The reference wind turbine controllers that are most commonly cited in the literature have been developed to work with specific reference wind turbines. Although these controllers have provided standard control functionalities, they are often not easy to modify for use on other 5 turbines, so it has been challenging for researchers to run representative, fully dynamic simulations of other wind turbine designs. The Reference Open-Source Controller (ROSCO) has been developed to provide a modular reference wind turbine controller that represents industry standards and performs comparably to or better than existing reference controllers.

• Wind Resource
• Metocean design conditions
• Turbine technology
• Structures, safety, reliability
• Controls: turbine and wind plant
• Offshore wind energy
• Wind plant design
• Distributed wind power/hybrid power systems
• Social science
• Education/research: undergraduate – post doctoral

The accompanying papers were organized by the following scientific area leads:

• Julie Lundquist, University of Colorado Boulder: Wind resource
• James Edson, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: Metocean design conditions
• Caroline Draxl, National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Metocean design conditions
• Todd Griffith, University of Texas Dallas: Turbine technology
• Sanjay Arwade University of Massachusetts Amherst: Structures, safety, reliability
• Rupp Carriveau, University of Windsor, Structures, safety, reliability
• Eric Simley, National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Controls
• David Schlipf, University of Flensburg: Controls
• Jason Jonkman National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Wind plant design
• Matt Churchfield, National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Wakes
• Amy Robertson, National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Offshore wind energy
• Ian Baring-Gould, National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Distributed wind power/hybrid power systems
• Bonnie Ram, University of Delaware: Social science
• Tom Acker, Norther Arizona University: Education

We would like to thank all of the scientific area leads and the many people who contributed to the success of the conference, particularly Jody Lally of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who coordinated all the logistics.

James F. Manwell Chair, NAWEA WindTech 2019 University of Massachusetts Amherst
Paul Veers Chair, NAWEA WindTech 2019 National Renewable Energy Laboratory