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Atmosphere to Electrons (A2e): Enabling innovative wind plant technologies through an enhanced understanding of wind plant physics.
Charlton Clark:
Fundamentally, the wind industry is changing right now. We’re moving away from just thinking about groups of wind turbines as a farm to really thinking about them as a wind power plant.
Jose Zayas:
The Atmosphere to Electrons initiative by the Department of Energy is really a brand-new consortia that was put together to really take wind energy from where we see it today to tomorrow. Where, as the name states, we really understand what is incoming to the wind plants in the atmosphere and really operate this generation asset in the most optimal way to ensure that all the electrons are efficiently being transmitted into the grid.
Mike Derby:
Atmosphere to Electrons is intended to provide an unprecedented understanding of how wind plants interact with our atmosphere. Based on that understanding, we’ll be able to develop new control paradigms for wind plants that will optimize how they operate and interact with our grid and maximize the energy that they produce.
Kiersten Ralston:
So the work being done by A2e is helping us to define the wind turbine of the future. It’s helping us reduce uncertainty where we site turbines, the energy forecasted from those turbines, how we operate those turbines over the life of the wind farm.
Charlton Clark:
The activities under A2e are going to help benefit the wind industry by really helping to clarify the overall capabilities of wind power plants to provide these grid services in a much clearer manner to help maintain system reliability and also help maintain a low-cost grid.
Dan Brake:
The equipment manufacturers have been really pushing the envelope of building larger turbines and more efficient turbines. The whole industry is trying to drive the levelized cost of energy down so that the wind industry is economic and competitive.
Mike Derby:
Current wind turbines are highly optimized, but they operate individually. The wind plant of the future needs to take these hundreds of turbines and get them to work collaboratively.
Nick Johnson:
What we’re trying to do is look at the wind plant as a whole rather than looking at individual turbines and so we want to understand the interplay in between them and how they affect one another and optimize these systems as such.
Dan Brake:
The wind comes from a certain direction and all the wind turbines in the park point in that same direction and get the most energy they can individually out of the wind. The wind park of the future, with this work we’re doing with the DOE, you’ll see the group of wind turbines all pointing slightly differently but because of that each one is making more power than they would have individually if they hadn’t been working together as a whole.
Kiersten Ralston:
So no one organization can do it alone. Even for a company the size of GE, it’s still a very difficult problem to solve. So we need the collaboration between national laboratories, academia, and industry partners like GE and others to really tackle this problem and help us quantify our fuel source.
Jose Zayas:
You know, for me, the next generation of wind plants is yet to be discovered. I imagine a future where we have machines that are working in complete unison with one another to capture energy and operate and deliver the most cost-effective electrons into the grid. That is a future where machines are self-organizing. They have awareness of each other through sensors and implementing control strategies so they can optimize themselves at any given point with any given condition that may be thrown at them. And the question for us is how do we do this cost effectively and reliably to ensure that the systems of tomorrow have both the operational efficiency that we seek and the economics that we need?