As owner of Jett Marketing, Samuel (Sam) Raymer oversees the leasing of land for wind farms. Sam Raymer’s role entails helping land owners to understand the incentives surrounding wind energy, so as to enable wind farm development.
In a collaborative program sponsored by the US Department of Energy, government agencies are working together with scholars and private-sector companies to improve the efficiency and overall effectiveness of wind farms. This program, known as Atmosphere to Electrons, or A2e, recently joined forces with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to release a report titled Enabling the SMART Wind Power Plant of the Future through Science-Based Innovation.
The report explains the scientific challenges involved in the creation of a wind farm and poses a solution based on the Scientific Management of Atmospheric Resource through Technology (SMART) concept. The SMART wind farm will incorporate turbines of different sizes and heights, each chosen to suit a particular positioning within the wind farm. This is in contrast to the current standard of wind farm design, which typically features large turbines faced into the wind for maximum collection.
The SMART wind farm will also feature a central controller, which can evaluate wind conditions and respond accordingly. Turbines on a SMART wind farm will be able to rotate and steer high-force winds away from turbines located downstream, so that those turbines can perform with maximum efficiency and prevent overloading. Meanwhile, a high-fidelity modeling system will use advanced sensing technology to monitor the operations of each turbine and schedule maintenance accordingly, so as to minimize repair cost and reduce overall cost of energy.
Scientists believe that implementation of this plan will reduce the cost of wind energy by 50 percent or more as compared to current levels. This may in turn lead to a wind energy increase that will satisfy 47 percent of the country's electricity needs by 2050.
