We are only beginning to understand the dynamics of airflow through large wind farms. Greg Poulos, CEO and Principal Atmospheric Scientist with ArcVera, talks with Allen and Joel at ACP 2023 about the complex nature of the winds at offshore and onshore wind sites. Billions in revenue are at stake!



ArcVera Renewables - https://arcvera.comPardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWind Power Lab - https://windpowerlab.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com











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ArcVera Interview



Allen Hall: Well, welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. We're here at American Clean Power 2023 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and we have a couple of special guests this week. But right now we have Greg Poulos from ArcVera, and Greg is the CEO and principal atmospheric scientist with ArcVera, which is based in Colorado.



Greg, welcome to the program and the. Thank you. We really wanted to have you on because, because we had Jessica on about a year ago. Mm-hmm. In San Antonio. Yep. At ACP in 2022. The data and the information and the analysis Arc Vera does is outstanding. You stand apart from a lot of the other atmospheric companies and because you're doing predictive aerodynamic assessments of wind farms and the, the one that was big last year was the Bight.



At the New York Bight on the leases and what kind of power production you were going to see out of those wind sites. Because the prediction was one thing from the operators, potentially, I think the Equinor Orsteds of the world, and what you were coming up with is like, well, maybe not as good as, as we have wanted it to be.



Maybe a deeper dive here. Yeah. And mostly be due to wakes and interference and the way that the, the winds are pushing. So the. The auction areas are not optimized for wind. Right. So you wanna describe some of the process you, you have gone through and, and what information you've found about the winds, particularly in the bite area.



What's new there? What are, what are the winds really gonna be in the bite when they all, all these wind turbines are installed out in, 



Greg Poulos: in the waters? Yeah. Yeah. So, The study we presented last year was more preliminary than what we're presenting this year, where we looked at the long term effects on energy production.



Mm-hmm. Right. From the three lease areas of key importance that were auctioned in the, the last Boeing auction, 4.2 billion was spent. Big money. Yeah. Yeah. You know, leasing those. And so we wanted to look at the potential lost revenue associated with the misorientation of. Of those three lease areas, we call this the Misorientation penalty.



Right. Yeah. So if they had instead oriented those lease areas north, south, they wouldn't interfere with each other as much. They picked southwest to northeast and the wind happens to blow from southwest to northeast. Yeah. And so the Southwestern most lease area wakes the next one. And those two together wake the third one, which is most heavily affected.



And in this year's version of, of taking that study further, we found that's between a half billion in loss revenue, conservatively calculated for the, the two that are in the Northeastern most This is unexpected, but it comes from this new technique that we validated called Windfarm Parameterization modeling.



Okay. It's an extension of what's called mesoscale modeling, which is a numerical weather prediction method that we u have used for decade.