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Sandia Technology logo A quarterly research and development magazine.

Fall 2006
Volume 8, No. 3

SANDIA TECHNOLOGY

Determining wind turbine efficiency

wind turbine field
Housed in an environmentally protected aluminum box, ATLAS II is capable of sampling a large number of signals at once to characterize the inflow, the operational state, and the structural response of a single wind turbine or a group.

ATLAS II is small, operates continuously, uses off-the-shelf components, and has lightning protection on all channels to increase reliability. “The system provides us with sufficient data to help us understand how our turbine blade designs perform in real-world conditions, allowing us to improve on the original design and our design codes,” says Jose Zayas, the project lead. Zayas has been working on ATLAS II since its inception in 1999.

wind map
Wind resource maps like this one from NREL take into account wind speed and terrain factors to arrive at a wind classification system. Most of the U.S. is suitable for wind energy, with the exception of the southeastern U.S.
Last year he and his Sandia team completed a project with GE Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to monitor the performance of a GE wind turbine at a Great Plains site about 30 miles south of Lamar, Colorado. The team will soon start monitoring a new project with Texas Tech University.

The GE Energy/NREL/Sandia collaboration involved testing a 1.5-megawatt, 80-meter-tall turbine with a rotor diameter of 70.6 meters. GE Energy is the largest wind turbine manufacturer in the U.S. and sells them to developers — such as Florida Power & Light — all over the world. Wind plant operators sell the electricity to utilities, who in turn supply the power to consumers.