Dear fellow Ninjas,
most of the windturbines available to select are not up to date any more. Only Vestas 90/2000 and Vestas 90/3000 are still manufactured. For my next research I would like to have a current standard turbine such as the vestas V117-3.45MW (high wind). I would like to make this option available for other poeple too. Can we incorporate this turbine?
Best wishes
Sebastian
By the way: I did some research about the wind turbines that you investigated (power curves, hub height etc.) I could share this information if you like - Is there any option to upload a pdf here?
Best wishes
Sebastian
Dear Sebastian,
We are currently working with some professional web developers to upgrade the ninja website. One thing this will include is a better interface for selecting turbine models and other options. In the R&D version of the wind model I use for my research there are around 100 power curves that can be selected from. Once we have the better interface in place, these will become available for users to select in the online model.
If you have specific power curve data that you can share, please email us at [email protected]. The data needs to be in spreadsheet form though rather than PDFs or charts, as we need some way to read it into the model. It must also be traceable/verifiable from an original source - as we have to go through quality assurance on all our data inputs to keep things ‘academic grade’.
Kind regards,
Iain
Dear Iain,
that’s good news! Thank you for your work!
Can you give an estimate when you will bring the new website online?
I will do some research and hope to find appropriate power curves to share with you. You said you already have 100 power curves. Is there any specific that would also be interesting for you? Of course I will keep your remarks about scientific quality in mind and provide the sources.
One nice feature that would make ninja even more powerful: It would be great if ninja could estimate the wind class at each location (IEC) so that only appropriate turbines could be selected. In the current version you can select a low wind class turbine and use it at a high windclass location. That brings good results in terms of high energy harvest, however that is technically not possible. This might be confusing for some people.
Best wishes
Sebastian
Dear Sebastian,
I’m sorry I never got back to you - so much going on… In the end I didn’t manage to estimate when it came online - but it is now!
Have a look at the 121 models of power curve we now have available - you can see them in the dropdown box where you select wind turbine model. These are mostly large European and American turbines (200kW+). The obvious gaps we have are for Chinese models (Goldwind, Sinovel, United Power, Mingyang) and smaller turbines (suitable for off-grid usage).
Regarding your suggestion - that would be technically very difficult to implement, as we would first need to run the wind speed simulation based on the location (and height) to know the average wind speed, before being able to refine the list of turbine models. At a higher level, it is perhaps not right to limit user choices on what turbines they can simulate - although it would be helpful to provide guidance. I’m afraid that for now this would likely have to be a post-processing stage a user would do themselves (select the raw data option to calculate average wind speeds, and then choose the turbine model that is most appropriate).
Kind regards,
Iain