Wind Analytics the best place for your turbine?

Hi there, I’m Jervis Whitley, and you’re listening to WindFront, a weekly roundup of the wind industry, from Australia and around the world. Today, I’m gonna talk about the top three in wind, who earned the most in wind this week, and a little known company called Wind Analytics, who are looking for the best place to locate your wind turbines. Top three in wind this week: Macarthur, Musselroe, and Woolnorth, with Macarthur topping out at just under $800,000, a low weekend wind this week.

Now on to Wind Analytics, a company that was part of an accelerator in New York City called NYC Acre. Acre is a clean tech incubating company, which has a number of different smaller companies go through it. They take a small cut, and in return, they get mentorship and access to other people in the industry, including investment from venture capitalists and things like that. One of the companies in that NYC Acre incubator is called Wind Analytics.

Wind Analytics is a company that aims to find the best location for your wind turbine. Through their software and methods, the company has been awarded a $1 million grant from New York State Energy Research and Development Authority to help improve economics with small wind. So really, the way the current market works for citing large wind turbines is that the large turbines are often using techniques which take multiple years to cite optimally a location for a turbine. This is not a luxury that a small operator would have, often in commercial, small commercial or residential or farming even at very small levels. You can’t justify studying 2 years worth of data to decide where to site your turbine. You only own the land that you have, and you’d like to find the optimum location on that site to place your turbine. Maybe it would be the difference between earning a lot or earning a little over the life of the turbine.

This company, with their software, claims to optimally locate your turbine on the site. They’ve got a patent out and warning to anyone who’s not interested in listening about Peyton’s, I had looked through the pain, and it looks like they’ve developed a method or system for having a server on the back end and you have like a tablet in your hand, answer a few questions about the site. You know, is there anything obstructing, where is that obstructing thing located? Do you have a site map, just different things like that? The practitioner would fill out these questionnaires. And it would find areas where there are store points in the wind, so it’s a bad place to locate a turbine in areas where there’s a free flow of wind for most of the time. Based on measurements from nearby known meteorological sites, for instance, like an airport, and some factors between the airport and the site that you’re located at to get a general view of how much wind would be in that area, followed by more factors to decide whether there are microclimates metre by metre on your site. So that way you could find the best location and height for the turbine. Obviously hire is probably better, in most cases.

So it’s interesting to see this company come out with their product. They’ve been in development for quite a few years now since 2007. They come from a parent company called Wind Products, and Wind Products is a company which, I guess, has the whole stack. They go from assessing wind, which is this Wind Analytics product, all the way through to the actual turbine itself, and it’s one of those vertical access design turbines that are around about 3 kilowatts in size and they sort of spin around on that vertical axis. They call it the butterfly turbine.

Now, my question for this week is, before a company like Wind Analytics came along, how were small turbines cited previously? Were there software for that or was it will protect practitioner involved, who picked the best location on site, free of any obstructions? And was that good enough? Would a system like this bring real revenue return over the lifetime of the wind turbine? Let me know what you think. And until I see you next time, keep buying those green electrons.