News Release

COLLEGE NEWS RELEASE / March 12, 2009

Boise State Engineering Research Team Working to Make Wind Power a More Predictable, Cost-Effective Reality

Researchers in Boise State University’s College of Engineering are developing a system that has the potential to predict when and how forcefully wind will drive power generation down to the blades of a single turbine. Applying innovative forecasting methods to the microscale, they are hoping to solve fundamental problems associated with harnessing renewable energy, from the lack of storage on transmission grids to the fact that Mother Nature doesn’t play by man’s rules.

“That’s why alternative energy is not yet as predictable and financially viable,” said Todd Haynes, a Boise State research engineer on the project along with lead researcher and professor Paul Dawson and engineering graduate students Alan Russell and Kevin Nuss. “We’re asking how we can better integrate intermittent renewables onto the grid and maximize utilization in a cost-effective way.”

Such goals are in line with the Obama administration’s pledge to double U.S. renewable energy production within the next three years. One of the key players hoping to help meet that challenge is Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), a federal agency that operates most of the high-voltage transmission in the Northwest and provides about half the electricity used in the region. The potential for wind power in BPA territory is huge, and Boise State’s yearlong project is among a handful the agency is funding to address issues of forecasting and storage.

What makes Boise State’s approach unique, according to Dawson, is a combination of meteorology, mechanical engineering and computer science. Using multi-scale computational codes, he and his fellow researchers will model anticipated wind speeds and effects on power forecasting and generation every five minutes, hour and day on a wind farm near Mountain Home, Idaho, owned and operated by John Deere Renewable Energy. John Deere is sharing the farm’s operational data for comparison; Idaho National Laboratory is providing powerful instrumentation that can download wind speeds almost in real time; Renaissance Engineering & Design is using another modeling tool to augment and verify forecasts; and Idaho Power is contributing experiential knowledge about grid operation, making the project something of a groundbreaking partnership.

“This is a collaboration between an educational institution, a government agency, a public utility and private companies,” said Mark Stokes, Idaho Power’s manager of power supply planning. “These efforts to improve wind forecasting will have a positive impact on system reliability as Idaho Power continues to add more wind generation into its portfolio of generation resources.”

“We know we can do this but not how fast or accurately. We want to find out if we can do it in a way that makes it worth it,” Haynes said. “What we learn could definitely be applied everywhere, and it’s a potential job generator if we can significantly overcome some of these challenges.”

Boise State’s BPA project team will present their work at WINDPOWER 2009, an American Wind Energy Association conference to be held in Chicago May 4-7.

“A lot of research has been done,” Russell said, “but everybody is interested in doing it better.”


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Media Contact: Erin Ryan, University Communications, (208) 426-4910, erinryan@boisestate.edu

Boise State University is “The New U Rising” with record student enrollment, new academic buildings, additional degree programs and a growing research agenda. Learn more at www.boisestate.edu. 

 

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Last reviewed on Thursday, March 12, 2009