7 October 2011

The headquarters of the National Renewable Energy Centre (CENER), located in Sarruguren, have been the venue this week for some conferences during which the "WAKEBENCH" project was launched. This is a new task of the wind branch of the International Energy Agency (IEA), whose ultimate aim is to develop wind model assessment procedures in wind farms and to draft some good practices guidelines in this regard.

More than 70 organisations from the 17 countries that form part of the IEA collaborate in this project. Representatives from 40 organisations, from universities, R&D centres and from the wind industry (consultants, wind turbine manufacturers and wind farm developers) participated at the kick-off meeting held at CENER. The state-of-the-art in wind modelling and wakes was presented and the initial work schedule was programmed, based on carrying out model comparisons, related to study cases with different levels of complexity.

CENER is the coordinator of this project, which will last for 3 years, and whose functions are also scheduled to include the technical supervision of aspects related to wind model assessment. Furthermore, the "WINDBENCH" validation web platform has been prepared, where information about the different users, models and study cases will be managed. This tool will permit centralising the wind farm model assessment activities at an international level.

On its part, the United States National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will be responsible for coordinating the wind farm and wind turbine wake model assessment.

In addition to the conferences, a technical visit was organised on the last day to the experimental farm that CENER has in Sierra de Alaiz, whose meteorological measurements will be used as one of the project case studies.