The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) began a project to collect wind power plant output data from several large commercial wind plants during the spring of 2000. The first wind power plant to participate in the project was the Lake Benton II Wind Power Plant connected to Xcel Energys transmission system in southwest Minnesota. NREL installed recording and communication equipment on site to transmit data back to NREL. The equipment recorded real and reactive power outputs and 3-phase line-to-ground voltages at the wind plant interconnection point at a 1-Hertz sampling rate. Since then, the number of wind plants participating in the project has gradually increased to include wind power plants in Iowa, Oklahoma, and Texas. In addition to the data collected by the recording equipment installed by NREL at the wind power plants, the project solicited historical wind power data of lower resolution (1-minute, 10-minute, and hourly) from utilities and plant operators/owners to reduce the cost of the program. All together, the project has collected data from more than 25 wind power plants with a total installed wind generating capacity of more than 4 GW. The majority of the data are 1-minute real power time-series data from Texas wind power plants beginning in 2004. The purpose of collecting these data is to (1) investigate the behavior of wind power and its statistical properties, (2) analyze the spatial and temporal correlation of wind power, (3) validate wind plant and wind forecasting models, and (4) make actual wind power time-series available for standard utility planning and operating study models to evaluate the impacts of wind power use on the electrical grid. The data collected by NREL have been used in several pioneering wind power integration studies to quantify the impacts of wind power on grid operations and ancillary services. However, as installed wind power capacity continues to increase rapidly, so does the need to expand the scope of data collection activities to include wind power plants in more geographically diverse regions. It is more critical to capture and to better understand spatial diversity of wind power and how it correlates with regional load patterns at higher wind power penetration levels. More importantly, as NREL launches its mesoscale modeling tasks for its western and eastern wind integration studies, it will need more historical wind power data to validate and calibrate the wind plant output models used to generate wind power time series for the United States. To establish a long-term wind power database, the wind plant data collection project will continue. To expand the scope of the project, NREL will focus on working with utilities and wind power plant operators/owners to retrieve the desired data from the utility energy management systems (EMS) and wind plant supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems.
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