International researchers explore new territory in the grand challenges of wind energy science | tidings

NREL researchers led a report addressing atmospheric science, turbine technology, grid integration, environmental code, and social science

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Wind energyone of the fastest growing and lowest cost sources of electricity in the worldwill play an important role in the transition to a carbon-free energy system. However, wind power growth must be planned with careful consideration of atmospheric physics, turbine design and grid resilience, as well as environmental and social impacts. Finding solutions to these types of challenges will require experts across their disciplines to collaborate.

That's the thesis of a new report co-authored by researchers at the US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) along with global industry and academic experts. report, Grand challenges revisited: Wind energy research needs for a global energy transitionfollows a 2019 article published in the journal science, which outlined three major challenges of wind energy research. Overall, these three original challenges focused on our insufficient understanding and inability to accurately model atmospheric physics, wind turbine technology, and grid integration of wind farms.

The new report expands those three original challenges to five:

• Atmospheric wind science
• Wind turbine systems
• Wind plants and grid
• Environmental code sign
• Social Sciences.

Three grand challenges were a grand start, he said Paul Veers, an NREL researcher and co-author of the report. But the readers of 2019 science the article pointed out that we had neglected to consider the environmental and social challenges of wind energy development. Recognizing our oversight, we incorporated these additional challenges into our expanded vision.

To further explore these five grand challenges and their intersections, Veers and his colleagues convened a meeting of current International Energy Agency (IEA) Wind Energy experts in February 2023. The reviewed grand challenges summarize key findings from that meeting

Course design for a complex system

Many countries around the world, including the United States, have set ambitious goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A first step towards these goals will be the transition to renewable energy sources, such as wind, in the coming decades.

However, for wind energy to play its part in the clean energy transition, the industry must address critical issues around the design, development and deployment of wind turbines and power plants. In addition, as the use of wind energy increases, its environmental and social impacts will also increase.

Wind power is complicated, Veers said. It comes with technical, environmental and social challenges that intersect and cross disciplinary boundaries.

To help address wind power's dynamic opportunities for expansion to meet global energy demand, IEA meeting participants examined the interdisciplinary issues created by the intersections between the five grand challenges. For Veers and his colleagues, these issues highlight the need to integrate social, environmental, economic and technical elements into wind turbine and plant design before they are built.

For example, a prospective wind farm site may also be near a population of eagles, and wind turbines pose a risk to eagles, Veers explained. This means that wind turbines and farms must be designed in a way that minimizes that risk while still maintaining optimal power generation, and this means that you must integrate knowledge about eagle behavior with knowledge about plant optimization.

Common Needs Through All Grand Challenges

Through their discussions, all groups at the IEA meeting observed three issues that all five challenges have in common, which are:

• Lack of understanding of basic concepts and terminology between wind energy disciplines, creating a need for interdisciplinary education
• The challenge of collecting and managing vast data sets while preserving intellectual property presents opportunities yet to be realized to leverage existing data through digitization
• These opportunities for discussion, such as the IEA's Thematic Experts Meeting, are rare and infrequent, but very enlightening.

It turned out that these experts enjoyed talking to each other across the boundaries of their disciplines, Veers said. There aren't many places where these different experts can come together, so doing so intentionally should be a goal.

Turbines continued to evolve

The IEA meeting's discussions also served as a reminder that wind energy still has plenty of room for innovation.

For Veers and his colleagues, supporting continued wind turbine advancement will require a holistic approach to design that considers metrics beyond levelized energy cost (the ratio of costs expended to energy produced). These designs must incorporate intelligent control systems, which increase turbine awareness and operational efficiency. Researchers need to step back and think about how these turbines are made, which will help improve industrial-scale turbine production, increase recyclability, avoid the use of critical materials, and lower production costs.

The wind turbine's current success doesn't mean it's a finished technology any more than the Model T's success means the car was a finished technology in 1920, Veers said. Current wind turbines work and are cost effective, but the requirements of the future will be very different from what they are today and what they have been in the past. The evolution of the wind turbine is still a huge field of opportunity.

Next steps

Now that the participants in the IEA Wind meetings have identified the critical issues at the intersections of wind energy's grand challenges, the next step will be to develop the solutions needed for the substantial expansion of wind energy.

Veers and his co-authors' findings provide the basis for a five-year roadmap for international collaborative research that will help wind power fulfill its role in the clean energy transition.

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