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White Papers

Power Performance Testing with Stand-Alone WINDCUBE® Lidar

An understanding of individual wind turbine performance at any modern wind farm is critical. The characterization of turbine efficiency is a necessary first step for detecting underperformance, evaluating turbine upgrades, refinancing or reselling a project, identifying degradation in performance over time and, increasingly, for wind farm owners trying to decide whether to invest in contractual power performance testing within the first year of plant operations per the IEC 61400-12-1:2005 standard.

In this white paper, we argue that ground-based WINDCUBE Lidar technology, deployed in a stand-alone fashion, provides a very similar input for assessing wind turbine performance in simple terrain sites - mimicking the role of an IEC met mast but with a much higher degree of flexibility and at a much lower cost. It is further shown that stand-alone wind measurements from Sodar technology provide significantly less certain results, making Sodars inherently less trustworthy or useful for this application.

Finally, we present a real world example from an operational power performance test undertaken in the Midwestern United States using stand-alone WINDCUBE Lidar measurements, and we describe the background campaign setup and methodology critical to the test's success.

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NRG Anemometers
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200M Wind Vane
200P Wind Vane
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