Celebrating Another Year of Progress for U.S. Offshore Wind
With more than 25,000 megawatts of generating capacity in the pipeline, the U.S. offshore wind industry is taking off. In the Wind Energy Technologies Office's biannual Wind R&D Newsletter, Acting Director Valerie Reed summarized what the office is doing to advance offshore wind technologies, including:
- Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have developed a novel feature that integrates stereo vision into software to better "see" the flight patterns of birds and bats.
- Research at the Scaled Wind Farm Technology facility in Lubbock, Texas, shows that a wind turbine can modulate real power for grid stability and provide regulating reserves using a frequency signal input to the wind turbine controller.
- A 4-year extension of the International Energy Agency's Task 30 will help refine the accuracy of coupled engineering tools used to design offshore wind power plants.
- The Wind Forecast Improvement Project has improved foundational weather forecasts in challenging areas of complex terrain.
Photo Credit: National Renewable Energy Laboratory