The final meeting of the second phase of the IEA Task 31 “WAKEBENCH” took place in Tokyo last 17-19 of September hosted by the University of Tokyo and co-organized with the Wind Energy Institute of Tokyo (WEIT).
The event started with an open day symposium where Task participants exchanged talks with the Japanese community on research activities related to modeling wind conditions and wind farm aerodynamics. In particular, it is worth mentioning the offshore wind map of Japan, developed by AIST, the IEC 61400-12-4 draft for a standard on numerical site calibration, led by University of Tokyo, and the application of Post-K exascale supercomputer to wind farm modeling participated by the University of Tokyo and the Wind Energy Institute of Tokyo.
The following two days were devoted to discussing the plans for a 3-year extension to Phase 3 to continue previous efforts at establishing an international framework for the development and evaluation of wind farm flow models for wind resource assessment, site suitability and wind farm design applications. To this end, high-fidelity experiments and validation cases produced in the New European Wind Atlas (NEWA) and U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) Atmosphere to Electrons (A2e) research programs will be leveraged to establish a unified international verification and validation (V&V) strategy. Industry engagement will be also a high priority for Phase 3 by aligning the validation strategy with industry standardization activities for wind resource assessment (IEC 61400-15) and numerical site calibration (IEC 61400-12-4).
This phase will have a stronger focus on Open Science by promoting data sharing and standardization to improve traceability and consistency in validation repositories managed in the Windbench platform. This will also allow reusing and improving evaluation procedures as new benchmarks are produced.
The structure of the Task holds with three technical work packages dealing with benchmarking of wind conditions, led by the National Renewable Energy Centre of Spain (CENER), benchmarking of wind farm wake models, led by the DoE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and V&V framework and uncertainty quantification, led by DoE’s Sandia National Laboratories.
If you are interested in participating in the IEA Task 31, you can contact the Operating Agent Javier Sanz Rodrigo (jsrodrigo@cener.com) and your national representative in the IEA-Wind Executive Committee. Further information about Task 31 V&V framework can be found in
The Wind Vane Blog.