Wind energy software

Several specialized wind energy software applications have been developed to aid in the development of wind farms.

Wind Energy Program Management

Wind Energy programs involves a multitude of people from vendor companies, service providers collaborating to execute the deployment of wind energy infrastructure. Large amount of documentation, lease management, asset tracking and warranty management are some of the key elements of effectively executing the program and managing it. Siterra provides a on-demand solution to help companies in this space.

Wind Turbine Design

Some specialized software applications are used to design wind turbines. These are used primarily by wind turbine manufacturers and the consultants who advise them.

The GH Bladed software package is the industry standard for wind turbine and component manufacturers worldwide. GH Bladed has been validated by Germanischer Lloyd for the calculation of wind turbine loads for design and certification.

Wind Data Analysis

Wind data analysis software assist the user in removing measurement errors from wind data sets and perform specialized statistical analysis. Popular applications are Windographer and WindRose.

Wind Flow Modeling

Wind flow modeling software aims to predict important characteristics of the wind resource at locations where measurements are not available. The most commonly used such software application is WAsP, created at Risø National Laboratory in Denmark. WAsP uses a potential flow model to predict how wind flows over the terrain at a site. WindSim is a similar application that uses CFD calculations instead, which are potentially more accurate.

Wind Farm Modeling

Wind farm modeling software aims to simulate the behavior of a proposed or existing wind farm, most importantly to calculate its energy production. The user can usually input wind data, height and roughness contour lines, wind turbine specifications, background maps, and define objects that represent environmental restrictions. This information is then used to design a wind farm that maximizes energy production while taking restrictions and construction issues into account. There are four wind farm modeling software applications available: openWind, WindPRO, WindFarmer, and WindFarm.

Prediction software

main article: Wind power forecasting

For existing wind farms, several software systems exist which produce short and medium term forecasts for the generated power (single farms or complete forecast regions) using existing numerical weather prediction data (NWP) and live (SCADA) farm data as input. Examples of numerical weather prediction models used for this purpose are the European HiRLAM (High Resolution Limited Area Model) and the GFS (Global Forecast System) from NOAA.