Hello everybody,
I am trying to run some simulations of energy systems, and have been looking to find measurements of energy generated by a wind turbine/group of turbines as well as solar irradiance data for the exact same location and time period as the wind turbine data in order to analyze hybrid system performance. Can anyone point me in the right direction as to where these data sets can be found? I was advised to look for them through the NREL website, but haven’t had any luck so far.
Thanks!
Fiodar
We take measurements of the wind and of solar irradiance at our site using our M2 met tower, and the data is on the web and free to access. However, our site is not a typical commercial wind site and doesn’t have a wind distribution that’s similar to what you’d find at such a commercial site. Thus, if you were to have power measurements from our turbines (which are not currently available), they would mislead you because many of them are only run for testing, and are not in full production. Further, if you were to model turbines based on the wind speed from the M2 tower even that wouldn’t give you representative results due to our unusual wind distribution.
I’m not sure of a commercial wind site that publishes both power measurements and solar data at the same time. However, you may be able to find wind power production data from an operator or other entity and then use the NREL PVWatts2 program (also freely available on the web) to generate simulated solar data from the same site.
Sorry I can’t be of more help.