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Whiffle Wind

With Whiffle Wind, you can now run your own LES simulations with just a few simple clicks. Leverage highly accurate wind data that analyzes complex wind flow dynamics such as wakes, turbulence, and blockage and optimize your wind resource and energy yield analysis.

Access breakthrough LES technology
via a user-friendly web app

In the dynamic domain of wind energy, making informed decisions based on accurate wind data is crucial. Whiffle Wind empowers wind energy professionals with seamless access to wind insights that capture aerodynamic phenomena such as turbulence, wakes, blockage and cluster effects, for enhanced wind resource and energy yield analysis. Harness the hyper-local accuracy of LES technology via an easy-to-use web interface and reduce uncertainties and financial risks in your wind farm design and planning process.

How does it work?
Setting up a simulation is easy:

  • Provide run-setup data 
  • Submit your simulation 
  • Download your outputs 

What's new? Explore Whiffle Wind's newest features:

  • Interactive map: See turbine and metmast locations post-simulation. 
  • Analytics: Analyze Windrose and Weibull graph insights. 
  • Performance overview: Gauge individual turbine metrics via the aggregated results table.

Features

  • Benefit from the hyper-local accuracy of LES technology that captures effects such as wakes, turbulence, and blockage at a 100 X 100m resolution. 
  • Navigate an intuitive web interface that easily integrates into your existing workflow to further enhance your wind resource assessments.
  • Achieve accuracy tailored to your specific site requirements, irrespective of terrain complexity, location or the intricacies of wind turbine clusters.

Make informed decisions based on physics-resolving technology.

FAQs

Are wakes and global blockage effects included?

Yes. LES physically models the phenomena of wind, pressure and atmospheric stability and their interaction with wind turbine-induced wake and blockage effects. Therefore, we don’t have to rely on non-physical/empirical correction factors for example blockage effects and deep-array effects

If external wind farms are not included in the simulation, then neither will their effects on the target wind farm be included. However, if external wind farms are added to the simulation, then their effects on the target wind farm will be modelled and included. If you wish to have additional analysis of external effects, you may want to consider making use of Whiffle’s Consulting service. For more information, feel free to send an email to info@whiffle.nl. 

Large Eddy Simulation (LES) is a model for turbulence and is gaining increased attention in the wind energy sector. The benefits of LES to model the wake and global blockage effects of wind farms lie in the fact it can model the interaction between wind farms and the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL). A recent overview on various aspects of the atmospheric flow through wind farms is presented in Stevens and Meneveau’s 2017 paper: Flow Structure and Turbulence in Wind Farms, volume 49.

The short answer is: it uses the statistical relationship (conditional probability density) between wind farm power predicted by the LES, and ERA5 wind speed. We then integrate this statistical relationship over the distribution of 10-15 years of ERA5 wind speed. This gives an estimate of the mean power that would be predicted by a 10-15 year LES run. The long answer will soon be available in a published paper. Certainly feel free to watch Whiffle’s list of published papers here! 

It’s not possible to perform this directly within Whiffle Wind. However, our consulting service can certainly perform this for you. You can contact Whiffle Consulting via info@whiffle.nl. 

Yes, but not through Whiffle Wind. We have a separate forecast service that can provide wind and solar power forecasts, wind speed forecasts, and any number of other meteorological forecasts you may be interested in. See our forecasting service for more information here. 

Using SCADA data of wind farms, it is possible to make ex-post assessments of Annual Energy Production (AEP) predictions. Based on a small (N ≤ 10) sample of wind farms that Whiffle has modelled, we estimate the mean error of AEP predictions are around 2% (GRASP underpredicts AEP) with a standard deviation of 4%. These numbers are based on direct GRASP output without any long-term correction or correction of mean wind speed biases. Therefore, this number represents not only errors in aerodynamic losses, but also errors in the mean wind speed. 

The default resolution of our LES is 100 m x 100 m in the horizontal plane and 25 m in the vertical. Our LES has been extensively validated on a wide range of sites (onshore, offshore, complex terrain) and wind farms for this resolution and provides the best trade-off between cost and accuracy.  

If you require other resolutions, please consider Whiffle’s Consultancy service which can be contacted via info@whiffle.nl. 

To bridge the gap between ERA5’s 30 km resolution and our 100 m resolution LES, an in-house, GPU-resident meso-scale model is run concurrently to generate the boundary conditions for our LES on the fly.  This model is run on a typical meso-scale resolution of 2 km and on a domain of a few hundred kilometers depending on the size of the LES domain.  

The rectangle drawn on the map within Whiffle Wind represents the LES domain. The LES domain is then nested within the larger mesoscale domain. 

Yes! For instructions see the video manual here at 7:10. 

Yes! For instructions see the video manual here at 3:20. 

The cost is based upon the domain size and duration of the simulation. To get a general idea of costs: 

A 12.8 km x 12.8 km one day simulation will cost around 6 Euro. A 12.8 km x 12.8 km full year simulation will cost around 2000 Euro. 

A 51.2 km x 51.2 km one day simulation will cost around 21 Euro. A 51.2 km x 51.2 km full year simulation will cost around 7700 Euro. 

Exact costs are shown prior to submitting a run; therefore, you will always know the cost up front. 

Currently a 51.2 km x 51.2 km domain is the largest. However, we’re working hard to make this even larger! If you need a larger domain, certainly feel free to contact Whiffle’s Consulting service via info@whiffle.nl. 

This depends on the domain size and length of the simulation, as well as how many other simulations have been requested and are in the queue. As a rough guideline, generally a one-day simulation should be available the next day or sooner, and generally a full year simulation should be available the next week or sooner.

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