PowerSight Basic Wind Forecasting

Designed for: Operator, Grid System Operator & Energy Marketer/Trader

For pricing and purchase details:

Product Description

Primary Uses

Energy trading and marketing
Power grid integration
Reducing imbalance charges
Making informed decisions about reserve energy sources
Construction phase decision-making
Daily operational and maintenance planning
Reducing the occurrence and length of curtailments
Overall system optimization

After years of effort finding a wind site with real potential and millions invested in funding, how do you capitalize on your investment and meet the revenue and capacity goals set up by your preliminary expectations? 3TIER wind forecasting allows you to make important decisions both in the construction and operational phases of your project.

Knowing what kind of conditions will come in the next day to week ahead is crucial to making cost effective decisions during the construction of your wind project and efficiently managing your project once it's fully functional. Forecasting information is vital to maximizing your wind project's energy production and revenue, particularly for satisfying power purchase agreements (PPA), and in scheduling routine maintenance and other turbine downtimes.

With the PowerSight Basic Wind Forecasting package, you have all the essentials for effectively planning maintenance and pre-scheduling energy. Forecasts are delivered through a customizable, client-specific dashboard interface and include easily interpreted graphics for both day- and week-ahead predictions of wind generation, so you can make decisions at a glance. Other environmental conditions, such as air temperature and precipitation, are also incorporated into the forecast package with graphical meteograms, which clearly illustrate the forecast time evolution of all of the key meteorological variables that influence project operations. In addition, we provide downloadable power and weather forecast data files to facilitate easy integration into your own internal software and scheduling systems.

As well as ease of use, the Basic Wind Forecasting package also offers incredible accuracy. 3TIER can provide an Outage Scheduler, which makes scheduling future outages or curtailments convenient via a simple web-based tool in the forecasting interface. By utilizing this tool, 3TIER can take periods where turbines are off line into account in overall forecast predictions, greatly improving forecast accuracy. To further improve accuracy, when historical met tower or power production data is available, 3TIER will apply advanced model output statistics (or MOS) to our atmospheric model simulations. This process significantly reduces overall forecast error and corrects forecast biases while preserving wind power ramp predictions.

Technical Overview

Product Features

Wind Power Forecast Tools

Day-ahead forecast for power
Week-ahead forecast for power
Downloadable forecast data files

Weather Forecast Tools

Meteograms for air temperature, precipitation, and hub height wind speed
Downloadable forecast data files

Optional Features

The interface can include an Outage Scheduler (i.e. available project capacity can be reduced), which allows 3TIER to incorporate planned outages or curtailments into our forecast.
Where at least one year of historical met tower or power production data is available, MOS-correction can be applied to improve forecast accuracy and reduce bias.
Seasonal Wind Power Forecast can be added to your wind forecast, which projects 12 months into the future and is based on 40 years of site-specific climatology and climate index forecasts.

Product Highlights

Powerful yet easy to use dashboard interface for accessing your wind power forecasts at a glance
Guaranteed 24/7 availability
Forecasts for your location update four times per day, cover the next operating day, and extend 168 hours into the future (1 full week).
Security. Easily set your own permissions system for access to forecast information with usernames and passwords for every forecast tool. In addition, 3TIER provides a secure password protected web host server for all data transfers.

Delivery Method

Forecasting data tools are made available via a client-specific dashboard interface accompanied by a data file with multiple format options (CSV, XML, XLS).

Methodology

Aligned with 3TIER's belief in using proven state-of-the-art modeling technologies to solve forecasting problems, our forecast system is a combination of advanced statistical algorithms, mesoscale numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, and publicly available weather forecasts, including data from the U.S. National Weather Service as well as other global weather forecast centers. Our model also incorporates the climatology for your project location using diurnal variability averages on a monthly time-scale.

Customer Requirements

In order to provide wind power forecasts, 3TIER must be supplied with all the meta data for your project such as: time zone, project location, hub height, turbine model, naming conventions, and other identifiers for met towers and turbines.

If you are unfamiliar with the technical terminology on this page, please visit our Glossary for more information.