New European Wind Atlas (NEWA) goes live with new experiment in Portugal at the beginning of next month. The experiment will make it easier to place wind turbines, so we will be able to get the ideal out of them.
Eight European countries have since 2014 worked on the project New European Wind Atlas (Newa). The group, consisting of universities or companies from Belgium, Germany, Latvia, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and Denmark, have been working on the creation of a new European Wind Atlas.
The Wind Atlas will be used to see how it would be best to place wind turbines, so you can get the maximum out of them. Wind turbine performance is in fact dependent on how nature is about the wind turbines; it is a wooded area, hilly area or a flat area, says Jakob Mann, professor at DTU Wind Energy and director of the project:
"When you have to place a wind turbine, it is extremely important to look at the nature that surrounds the wind turbine. We know of cases from Germany, where wind turbines have been placed geographically wrong, so they only produced about half of what they had intended, they should produce. It's problems like that, we're going to meet with NEWA," Jakob Mann says.
New records
The researchers have now started working in a hilly area in Portugal, Pedigäo. Over the next five months the researchers will gather data that will show how the wind behaves in that kind of terrain.
NEWA will make it so we in the future can see distances of 100-500 meters, which is a new record. It has never before been possible to have such detailed mapping of wind resources, says Jakob Mann.
"Even little changes will have a major impact on the production from the wind turbines. A change in the amount of 10 percent in the wind speed will change the production of power by up to 30 percent."