DOE Awards $28 Million for Wind Energy Research, Development, and Demonstration Projects

While utility-scale, land-based wind energy in the United States has grown to 96 gigawatts, significant opportunities for cost reductions remain, especially in the areas of offshore wind, distributed wind, and tall wind.

The funding selections were announced by DOE’s Assistant Secretary for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Daniel R Simmons, at the American Wind Energy Association Offshore WINDPOWER Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. “These projects will be instrumental in driving down technology costs and increasing consumer options for wind across the United States as part of our comprehensive energy portfolio,” said Simmons.

The selected projects span the technology development spectrum—including testing, demonstration, integration, and technical assistance—and cover all three wind energy sectors: distributed, offshore, and land-based utility-scale wind.

Four Wind Innovations for Rural Economic Development (WIRED) projects will receive a total of $6 million in federal funding to support rural electric utilities by developing technology to integrate wind with other distributed energy resources, and by simplifying distributed wind energy project development through standardized solutions and technical assistance.

• Bergey WindPower of Norman, Oklahoma will develop a standardized distributed wind/battery/generator micro-grid system that rural utilities can provide to rural homes and businesses to deliver resilience, energy savings, and reliable power.
• Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) of Palo Alto, California will develop novel modeling, planning, and operation methods for deploying and operating wind energy and battery storage technologies that allow increased wind energy while maintaining rural grid reliability.
• Iowa State University of Ames, Iowa will design optimization models and control algorithms that help rural utilities leverage distributed wind in coordination with other distributed energy resources such as battery storage and solar PV.
• The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association of Arlington, Virginia will provide technical assistance and develop standardized wind engineering solutions, metrics, case studies, best practices, and finance models to help rural cooperatives cost effectively adopt distributed wind.

Six projects will receive a total of $7 million to conduct testing in support of innovative offshore wind research and development utilizing existing national-level testing facilities. Two of these projects involve upgrades to the facilities.

• Clemson University of North Charleston, South Carolina will improve offshore-scale wind turbine nacelle testing through a hardware-in-the-loop capability enabling concurrent mechanical, electrical, and controller testing on the 7.5-megawatt (MW) dynamometer at its Wind Turbine Drivetrain Testing Facility.
• Lehigh University of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania will upgrade its soil-foundation interaction laboratory to combine computer simulation with physical testing to model impacts of wind, waves, currents, and other factors on offshore wind turbine structures.
• The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center in Boston, Massachusetts will upgrade its Wind Technology Testing Center to enable structural testing of 85 to 120-meter long blades.
• Oregon State University of Corvallis, Oregon will use numerical models to simulate the combined effects of wind and waves on floating offshore wind turbines in a wave basin.
• Tufts University of Medford, Massachusetts will quantify the effects of fatigue on the stiffness, strength, and durability of various marine concrete mixtures to facilitate development of cost-effective, resilient concrete offshore wind support structures.
• The University of Massachusetts–Lowell will develop and validate a novel autonomous method of using measured acoustic pressure to detect degradation and damage in wind turbine blades.

Two offshore wind technology demonstration projects will receive up to a total of $10 million to conduct additional project development activities that enable demonstration of innovative technologies or methodologies to reduce offshore wind energy risk and cost.

• The Lake Erie Energy Development Corporation of Cleveland, Ohio will use state-of-the-art sensing technologies to characterize the activity of birds near their project site in Lake Erie.
• The University of Maine at Orono will develop an alternative floating substructure design for a 10–12 MW wind turbine in place of the currently planned two 6-MW turbine floating offshore wind demonstration project planned for deployment off Monhegan Island, Maine.

One project will receive up to $5 million to validate manufacturing innovations and demonstrate cost-effective tall tower technology that can overcome the transportation constraints currently hindering tall tower installations in the United States. Taller wind turbine towers can enable access to higher wind speeds, thereby increasing energy capture and reducing cost, but continued economies of scale are currently limited by transportation constraints.

• Keystone Tower Systems of Westminster, Colorado will demonstrate on-site spiral welding of a 160-meter wind turbine tower, as well as installation of up-tower components with a tower-mounted self-hoisting crane.

Learn more about DOE’s wind energy research on the Wind Energy Technologies Office website.