Natural Power's global technical team have delivered comprehensive energy yield and site assessment studies on a proposed wind farm project in Alaska for non-profit rural electric co-operative Golden Valley Electric Association (GVEA).
This has been Natural Power's first involvement in Alaska, and marks a milestone in terms of the rapid growth of the company's activities in North America.
The project drew on Natural Power's global expertise, with the delivery including input from technical team members working from a number of Natural Power's global offices including Vancouver, Strasbourg and our Scottish Head-Quarters, The Green House.
Natural Power's inputs will assist the client in assessing the financial viability of the project, with the ultimate goal of assisting the client to secure finance on the site.
The process included on-site data collection, long-term resource analysis, energy yield modelling, uncertainty analysis and post construction yield assessment.
Site classification studies will also take place to predict extremes of resource and flow characteristics for design decisions and turbine/device warranty considerations.
The site in Alaska has moderately complex terrain combined with forestry therefore VENTOS, the industry's most validated Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tool, was deployed and assessments were used to define the flow conditions on-site and also to aid with the layout design process of the proposed 16 turbine project.
The project with GVEA was led by Natural Power wind engineer Mark Green, based in Vancouver who commented: "The GVEA project was an interesting one to be involved in as it was the first of its kind for us in Alaska.
"GVEA use a diverse fuel supply of coal, oil, hydroelectric power and natural gas so I valued the fact Natural Power was able to help GVEA investigate the use of wind power – it's always a great achievement when you can have a direct influence on increasing the use of renewable energy."
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