El Salvador’s first wind farm, the 54-MW Ventus Wind Project, has been commissioned by Guatemalan power developer Tracia Network Corporation.
Located in Metapán, the wind farm comprises 15 Vestas V136-3.6 turbines and was designed to help reduce the nation’s dependence on imported fossil fuels, provide greater stability in the price of energy and diversify the national energy power grid.
Tracia Network Corp. was supported by ArcVera Renewables’ mesoscale modelling technique in early project stages to define and optimize wind power output.
For this project, ArcVera pioneered the use of very high-resolution (on the turbine-to-turbine spacing scale) microscale/mesoscale modeling that is more commonly used for atmospheric science research and weather forecasting.
According to ArcVera, this modeling produces more accurate hub-height wind flow patterns using supercomputers and other proprietary techniques to render high-resolution, three-dimensional, time-series modeling of the winds and weather where wind turbines perform.
The results optimize meteorological measurement locations before deployment and at early project stages accurately informs wind turbine array design and energy estimation. The modeling results can also be applied through financing and later operational performance assessments.
“The results of the ArcVera team enabled us to identify a better location, played a crucial role and input to win an auction, secure another 150 basis points of capacity factor for the Ventus project, and on a general note we felt the safety of solid calculations and projections that enabled us to execute different development steps in this pioneering project,” said Paul Wagner, Project Manager at Ventus.
Greg Poulos, ArcVera Renewables CEO and Principal Atmospheric Scientist, said: “At critical development stages where decisions need to be made, the results trumped the CFD results provided by the wind turbine supplier, ArcVera then fine-tuned those results with actual site visits where it finalized the precise location of turbine positions and delivery of the project’s finance-ready energy report.”
