AIRE. Advanced study of the atmospheric flow Integrating REal climate conditions to enhance wind farm and wind turbine power production and increase components durability

To deliver the future needed renewable energy capacity, wind farm developers will have to use larger turbines, at higher altitudes, explore novel geographical regions and offshore sites. Currently, wind turbines and wind farms are designed and operated considering “just” wind conditions. Consequently, the models do not take into account the physics and aerodynamics of atmospheric wind flows at high altitudes, neither how this is affected by the location, the effect of precipitation and/or sand. This reduces the expected efficiency of wind energy production, and makes hard to estimate the energy outputs, operating costs and lifespan of blades and turbines, increasing variability and the risk to investors and project developers when designing wind farms, reducing the total potential investment. Unless new sites can be identified and designed optimally, the LCOEs will start to rise as developers have to design wind farms that cannot be well predicted with conventional models.

The AIRE consortium foresees precipitation and other events (clouds, sand, shear, inflow) that wind brings into the state of play to be the new key parameters for siting of wind turbines, wind farm design, component design and O&M strategies planning. AIRE will investigate solution to assess the potential impact of REAL climate conditions in different terrains, and different altitudes both onshore and offshore, gathering information from 4 experimental sites and 4 commercial wind farms. Specially AIRE will bring together researchers, blade manufacturers and utilities to create an open access knowledge hub of experimental data, develop new numerical models, build tools to design and control wind turbines and wind farms. The effectiveness of the developed tools and models will be validated using data from commercial wind farms.

CENER will be responsible for the overall management of the project and will ensure that any updates to the various plans created are being followed as needed throughout the project. It also leads WP6 “Improvement of wind turbine blade design for operation in real climate conditions”. In this WP, two optimized airfoils will be designed and characterized in order to make blades resilient to wear caused by harmful climatic conditions and two rotors (10-15MW) will be designed using CENER´s tool BladeOASIS: one baseline rotor using standard rotor design methods and a second advanced rotor using the project findings including the optimized airfoils. Moreover, CENER will be responsible for Data gathering, creation of the open-access knowledge hub and data quality control; and its experimental site (Alaiz wind farm) will be monitored during the project as a representative high altitude and complex terrain site.