Services
Rich Simon’s 45 years working in wind energy have given him a unique palate of skills, insights and experience in the industry. This information is brought to bear on all assignments he undertakes, and clients always receive timely response, reasonable cost, and top value. Simon Wind provides a full complement of wind energy resource assessment services, including:
· Identification of windy land, also known as wind prospecting
· Design of meteorological measurement campaigns
· Support for tower installations
· Receipt, edit, process, analyze and report meteorological data from towers
· Turbine array siting
· Wind energy resource assessment
· Due diligence support for financing
· Turbine suitability
· Operational analysis
Identification of windy land, also known as wind prospecting. Simon Wind has been doing this for 40 years, across the United States, elsewhere in North America, and in other continents.
Design of meteorological measurement campaigns. This is a key area to add value, as a properly designed campaign maximizes the benefit of the data and reduces uncertainty for financing project. We helped develop guidelines for this work with government contracts in the 1980s and 1990s. We have designed hundreds of such measurement campaigns and continue to do so today. Often these campaigns rely solely on standard met towers, sometimes we recommend sodar or lidar to complement the met towers.
Support for tower installations. Simon Wind does not physically install towers, but we maintain a relationship with the top qualified installation companies. Normally we obtain quotes from those companies, make recommendations to the client which company to select, generate equipment purchase orders from certified vendors, create specific documents where and how towers should be installed and instrumented, and communicate frequently during the installation process to ensure towers are erected as we specify, including ensuring that we can receive proper wind data from a new tower before the installation crew departs the project site.
Receipt, edit, process, analyze and report meteorological data from towers. We have a data intake system that automatically takes wind information and sorts it by client and tower. Our standard process is to do a cursory check weekly to ensure the data are coming in and no sensor has failed, then after the end of each month perform formal quality control on the data and submit reports. Our quality control methodology combines a customized version of Windographer software with proprietary techniques we’ve developed. Reports are submitted to clients monthly (or at any other requested interval), and prior to financing are generally furnished in an interactive Excel workbook format. Simon Wind has processed data from perhaps 10,000 stations over the decades.
Turbine array siting. As sufficient wind data are collected and the client obtains other pertinent project information, we can start creating turbine array plans. At this stage they are done on the desktop. The wind regime is used to guide selection of turbine models and hub heights. As a project matures, we often interact with other disciplines (engineering, construction, environmental, permits, etc.) to optimize the array plan, which is finalized in the field.
Wind energy resource assessment. The process to incorporate wind and turbine data to assess wind energy resource potential involves many steps. For a given array, we use the on-site terrain and wind information to model long-term mean annual hub-height wind speeds at each proposed turbine locations. We offer a full suite of wind flow models (simplified, mass-consistent, mesoscale) to be applied at different stages of the resource assessment process, plus seven wake models. We have provided hundreds of wind energy resource assessment reports over the decades, and these include probability analyses important for lenders.
Due diligence support for financing. As projects move from planning to financing, Simon Wind has a long track record of working with banks and other financial parties. This can take the form of financeable wind energy resource assessment reports written on behalf of a developer, or formal due diligence reviews of projects we’ve not been associated with in the planning stage.
Turbine suitability. Certification of turbines by a vendor for a specific project site involves forms detailing the wind characteristics, which Simon Wind generates and submits to the vendors for their load analysis studies. We provide such forms at all stages of the development cycle, dependent on client needs.
Operational analysis. We are often called upon to check how wind farms are producing compared to their pre-construction projections. These can be projects we’ve worked on, but often they are projects that someone else did the resource projections.
