Technology and Market-Design Challenges to Decarbonize Electricity Systems

Ramteen Sioshansi, Carnegie Mellon Scott Institute for Energy Innovation

Professor, Engineering and Public Policy, Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Director, Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center, Faculty Affiliate, Carnegie Mellon Scott Institute for Energy Innovation 
The electricity industry, policymakers, and regulators are grappling with decarbonizing electricity systems. Decarbonization will yield significant changes in how electricity systems are planned and operated and will require policy and market-design reforms. This talk will survey these changes as well as the major challenge of achieving the final 10%-20% of decarbonization (relative to a business-as-usual benchmark).

The future and the research questions of land-based wind turbine technology

Pietro Bortolotti, National Wind Technology Center

The past few decades have seen substantial reductions in the cost of wind energy. One key factor behind this trend has been the increase in average rotor size. Larger rotors capture more energy while limiting costs, such as operation and maintenance and balance of stations. Low-specific-power turbines—i.e., relatively larger rotors on the same machine rating—increase capacity factors and the availability of wind power.

This seminar will discuss the research work funded by the U.S. Department of Energy investigating multiple technologies to support the land-based wind turbines of the future. The potential and the challenges of innovations such as highly flexible blades, downwind rotors, controlled bending of components during rail transportation, and distributed aerodynamic control will be discussed, together with unresolved research questions.

A Call to Science-Understanding Fisheries, Wildlife and Ecosystem Surveys in a New Era of Offshore Wind Development and Marine Industrialization

Andrew (Andy) Lipsky, Offshore Wind Ecology Branch Chief, NEFSC

To meet state and federal renewable energy targets offshore wind development is rapidly expanding in the Northwest Atlantic, Gulf Of Mexico, and Pacific regions of the United States. By 2030 to meet U.S. national goal of 30 gigawatts of energy, the Northeast large marine ecosystem will be occupied by ~over 2.4 million acres of leases, 3400 turbines, and 10,000 miles of submarine cables with an additional 18.87 million acres under consideration for further development. Offshore wind development is also scheduled for the U.S. Pacific Islands and the Caribbean. At a global scale, Europe, Asia, and North and South America will add over 177 gigawatts of cumulative offshore wind development over the next five years (U.S Department of Energy, 2022). This development will consist of a 3.5 fold increase in fixed turbine technologies in waters less than 60 meters and 68 fold increase of first of its kind floating offshore wind technologies in waters over 1,000+ meters in depth. This change may likely represent the greatest single marine industrialization event across our global oceans. The pace, scale, and scope of this development creates scientific demands for regulatory and scientific missions at NOAA Fisheries and our international partners. Addressing the interaction of wind on fisheries, fishing communities, wildlife, marine habitats, and ecosystem surveys requires deepening our collaborations and for the international scientific community to urgently increase our scientific capabilities. This presentation will provide an overview of these scientific needs and how fishing communities, academic partners, managers and international scientific community can work together to meet them.

Aerodynamic modeling of wind power across rotor operational and atmospheric conditions for optimization

Michael Howland, Assistant Professor, Dept of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

To meet net-zero carbon emissions targets by mid-century, up to a -fold increase in wind power capacity is required. Acceleration to this rate requires urgent improvements to efficiency and reliability of installed wind farms, as well as cost reductions for future offshore farms. To expand energy production, wind turbines are rapidly increasing in size, wind farms are proliferating to new locations and are increasing in size and siting density, and novel wind farm design and control methods are increasingly deployed. But current engineering models driving wind power design and control rely on idealized theory that neglects key aspects of the rotor aerodynamics and the atmospheric boundary layer, which are increasingly important for larger turbines and farms. We revisit the first-principles of mass, momentum, and energy conservation to develop a Unified Momentum theory for rotors across operating regimes, accounting for arbitrary misalignments between rotor and inflow and thrust coefficients. The model is validated against large eddy simulations and generalizes and replaces both classical momentum theory and the Betz limit. In the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL), the sheared wind speed and direction may change significantly over the rotor area, resulting in a relative inflow wind to the blade airfoil which depends on the radial and azimuthal positions. In order to predict the power and thrust based on the incident ABL velocities, we develop a blade element model which accounts for wind speed and direction changes over the rotor area, and the model is validated using experimental data from a utility-scale wind farm. Going from the scale of a turbine to a farm, wake losses can reduce farm energy 10-20%, a significant loss that negatively impacts economics and is increasing given wind power expansion. Using large eddy simulations of wind turbines operating in a range of atmospheric conditions, we systematically uncover the significant roles of Coriolis effects and stability on wake recovery, trajectory, and morphology. A new fast-running wind farm model that accounts for the coupled rotor operational and atmospheric effects on wakes is developed. The wind farm model is leveraged for applications including collective control and for control co-design, applied in both simulations and utility-scale field experiments. Collective control can increase the energy generation of wind farms through software modifications, without additional turbines or hardware. ARROW faculty may contact Zoe Getman-Pickering ([email protected]) for a copy of the recorded talk.