The wind landscape is changing. So should your wind map.
Introducing WakeMap™ – the GPU-powered and new industry standard in wind resource modeling.
The growing problem of “long wakes”
Industry has long assumed that wind farm wakes dissipate after no more than about 5 kilometers (km) – but we now know that’s not true. Growing evidence shows that wakes travel up to 50 km and beyond, both offshore and onshore, under specific but regularly occurring atmospheric conditions. Neighboring wind farms are competing for a limited wind resource, and are losing millions of dollars in the process. Knowing where and where not to put your next wind farm is vital to maximizing your project’s revenue in an increasingly crowded market.
“The evidence is now clear: wakes can travel well beyond the borders of a wind farm, and they are costing millions of dollars in lost revenue. Projects that looked high performing on paper are quickly turning into real-world losses.”
– Mike Optis, President, Veer Renewables
Model bias is growing
Wind resource assessment used to be straightforward. A wind map directed you to the windiest locations, and a measurement campaign corrected the bias in the map. From there, the wind farm was designed and built.
But then a lof of wind farms were built, and long wakes became a problem. Today, many areas are downright crowded, and the available wind resource is decreasing. Conventional wind maps aren’t accounting for this, and the bias between modeled and real-world winds is growing.
With over 80,000 wind turbines currently operating in North America, and with the U.S. planning to double wind energy capacity by 2030, this problem will only become more urgent. We need a better wind map that accounts for long wakes.
Minimize “wind theft” and future-proof your investments
WakeMap™ is the new industry standard in wind resource modeling. Produced using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, and leveraging its wind farm parameterization, WakeMap™ can account for wind farm impacts anywhere in the world, including from the over 80,000 wind turbines operating in North America.
We offer fully customizable, high-resolution (down to 1km) WakeMap™ runs to cater to your specific needs. For instance, we can run over a set time period or a typical meteorological year representative of long-term conditions. Further, we can model existing wind farms as well as those not yet constructed. Given its flexibility, WakeMap™ is quickly becoming a vital tool for understanding and quantifying long wake impacts on annual energy production, or P50.
WakeMap™ has been extensively validated against wind farm data, so you can trust what it is telling you. Read our white paper to learn more.
“Wind modeling that does not account for wind farm impacts will become increasingly inaccurate and obsolete as we rapidly expand global wind farm capacity.”
– Mike Optis, President, Veer Renewables