AIRE: Advanced study of the atmospheric flow Integrating REal climate conditions to enhance wind farm and wind turbine power production and increase components durability

To deliver the future needed renewable energy capacity, wind farm developers will have to use larger turbines, at higher altitudes, explore novel geographical regions and offshore sites.

Currently, wind turbines and wind farms are designed and operated considering “just” wind conditions. Consequently, the models do not take into account the physics and aerodynamics of atmospheric wind flows at high altitudes, neither how this is affected by the location, the effect of precipitation and/or sand. This reduces the expected efficiency of wind energy production, and makes hard to estimate the energy outputs, operating costs and lifespan of blades and turbines, increasing variability and the risk to investors and project developers when designing wind farms, reducing the total potential investment. Unless new sites can be identified and designed optimally, the LCOEs will start to rise as developers have to design wind farms that cannot be well predicted with conventional models.

The AIRE consortium foresees precipitation and other events (clouds, sand, shear, inflow) that wind brings into the state of play to be the new key parameters for siting of wind turbines, wind farm design, component design and OM strategies planning. AIRE will investigate solution to assess the potential impact of REAL climate conditions in different terrains, and different altitudes both onshore and offshore, gathering information from 4 experimental sites and 4 commercial wind farms.
Specially AIRE will bring together researchers, blade manufacturers and utilities to create an open access knowledge hub of experimental data, develop new numerical models, build tools to design and control wind turbines and wind farms. The effectiveness of the developed tools and models will be validated using data from commercial wind farms