Sean Penn and his jury of film luminaries have left Cannes. The curtains have been drawn across the festival screens, the empty bottles of Cristal have been swept away, the yachts are being moored and polished. But grieve not! The stars will come out again in June for Cannes Lions 2008, the International Advertising Festival.

Will renewable energy once again feel the love?

The 2007 winner for best television ad from Germany was “The Power of Wind,” a spot produced for EPURON, a developer of utility-scale renewable energy projects, by the agency Nordpol+Hamburg. Ever wondered what a Wim Wenders-Marcel Marceau collaboration might produce?

Now you know. Hat tip to the Gristmill blog. 

Oh, and let me know if you really like wind-related short films. (And hey, who doesn’t?) I might have something else to share with you.

Everyone’s busy preparing for the trip to Houston from June 1 to 4 for WINDPOWER, the annual party thrown by the American Wind Energy Association. If you’ll be there, come see us at booth 1253, and pick up a free world wind map poster with a special surprise on the other side.

And look for us in the following sessions:

Wind Forecasting 101
Sunday, June 1, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Pascal Storck will chair the seminar; Eric Grimit will help instruct.

Applications in Wind Energy Forecasting
Tuesday, June 3, 2008, 1 to 2:30 p.m.
Cameron Potter will moderate this panel discussion.

Future Topics for Utility Evaluation of Wind Generation
Tuesday, June 3, 2008, 1 to 2:30 p.m.
Eric Grimit will present “A Prototype Day-Ahead Forecast System for Rapid Wind Ramp Events.”

Understanding Project Operational Results
Wednesday, June 4, 3 to 4:30 p.m.
Cam Potter will present “Non-Deterministic Wind Speed to Power Output Conversion.”

Browse or search the entire WINDPOWER conference program for other things to do and see in Houston.

“I do wind energy forecasting,” says Kristin Larson, one of the 3TIER power prognosticators. What Kristin likes most about her job is that “there’s always new weather, always ways to do better forecasts,” she says. “I like making the customers happy.”

Most of our forecast clients are power operators who rely on us to help them prepare for the inherent intermittency of wind. In other words, while power companies are expected to keep the lights on no matter what, the wind doesn’t always blow. Fortunately for me, surfing the internet on my front porch on a calm day, wind isn’t the only power generator in a utility company’s mix: If the wind is down, they will switch to another source of energy. For lots of reasons, not the least of which is preserving expensive fossil fuel if they can, utilities like to know with some precision when they can rely on wind, and when they can’t.

Short of ensuring constant winds — which we’re pretty sure Kristin, despite her superpowers, cannot do — Kristin makes customers happy by providing accurate predictions. “We tell clients how much power they will get from their wind farms over the next couple of hours to a week,” Kristin says.
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Now that you’ve got the 411 on our assessments, you’re probably wondering how that’s different from forecasting, the other thing on which we spend a lot of time and computing power.

In short, an assessment analyzes lots of past data to tell you what the weather was like, whereas a forecast tells you what the weather will be like. “Assessment is ‘hindcasting,’” Scott Eichelberger says. Which means forecasting is … well, you know what it is. Scott didn’t give me a pithy one-liner for forecasting.

Who uses our assessments? Developers who are prospecting for sites for new installations, financiers wanting to know the power-producing potential of a site, and builders who want weather data to help guide which equipment and technology they use. FirstLook assessments are available for wind and solar, whereas the more detailed FullView assessments cover wind.

Who wants forecasts? Usually, energy site and utilities operators who need to plan which sources of power they will call upon in order to ensure a steady supply to the grid. We currently forecast for wind and hydro. I’ll cover forecasting in much more detail in upcoming posts.

In the post “Assessment 101,” I mentioned that Scott Eichelberger and his ilk get a lot of grilling while staffing the 3TIER booth, and not just about the location of the restrooms, or which booths give away the best tchotchkes. People want to know how our method, numerical weather prediction (NWP), compares to other techniques. Many of our competitors are using a method called measure, correlate, predict, or MCP. Here’s the skinny on some key differences between the two.

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Yesterday, the Department of Energy released a report titled, “20% Wind Energy by 2030: Increasing Wind Energy’s Contribution to U.S. Electricity Supply.” You can visit the report’s website to download the 4MB pdf, or read the press release on the DOE site. The report resulted from a collaboration among government, industry, and environmental groups. From the DOE press release:

The analysis concludes that reaching 20 percent wind energy will require enhanced transmission infrastructure, streamlined siting and permitting regimes, improved reliability and operability of wind systems, and increased U.S. wind manufacturing capacity. Highlights of the report include:

1. Annual installations need to increase more than threefold. Achieving 20 percent wind will require the number of annual turbine installations to increase from approximately 2000 in 2006 to almost 7000 in 2017.
2. Costs of integrating intermittent wind power into the grid are modest. 20 percent wind can be reliably integrated into the grid for less than 0.5 cents per kWh.
3. No material constraints currently exist. Although demand for copper, fiberglass and other raw materials will increase, achieving 20 percent wind is not limited by the availability of raw materials.
4. Transmission challenges need to be addressed. Issues related to siting and cost allocation of new transmission lines to access the Nation’s best wind resources will need to be resolved in order to achieve 20 percent wind.

The report does not mention production tax credits for wind (and other renewables), which are due to expire at the end of this year. The Senate has approved a year’s extension; The House is still mulling it over.

The title of this post is an old maxim for writers, a reminder that an example is much more compelling to readers than a factoid.

Fact: Despite turbine shortages, installed wind energy in 2007 far outpaced projections, according to the Worldwatch Institute’s Vital Sign Update (password required, so here’s a summary). The United States added 5,244 megawatts, bringing our total wind capacity to 16,818 megawatts – second to the world leader in wind, Germany.

Example: Much as I would love to travel America to chronicle the growth of wind power (Wait. Can I do that? Is there funding? Call me!), for now we’ll be content to look at some news from a locality affected by the wind power boom. (more…)

Canada’s Energy-TV recently aired a feature on our REmapping the World initiative, starring Ken Westrick and some truly beautiful footage, especially of offshore wind turbines. (I really do think they’re lovely, in a Bauhaus sort of way.) You can learn more about REmapping the World here.

The inventors of the silicon solar cell were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio late last week, along with 13 others, whose creations range from Styrofoam to Bose noise-reducing headphones (which I credit for preventing me from committing capital crimes while doing time in a cubicle as a writer for SuperMegaCorp).

First unveiled in 1954 and boasting 6 percent efficiency, the first modern solar cell was patented in 1957 by AT&T’s Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller, and Gerald Pearson. Patent number US2780765 describes their “Solar Energy Converting Apparatus.” In addition to converting solar energy to electricity, the technology developed by Chapin, Fuller, and Pearson is credited for making possible space exploration, fiber optics, and many science fair projects.

The three gentlemen were inducted in the Hall of Fame posthumously.

Unlike many tech firms, which keep the brains of their operations sequestered in dimly lit cubicle farms veneered with the orange dust of long-gone Cheetos stuck to spilled Mountain Dew, 3TIER lets its scientists out in public. Many of the questions Scott Eichelberger, our assessment tsar, fields when he’s staffing the 3TIER booth at meetings have to do with how we perform our weather modeling magic, and where the data comes from. In fact, I had the same questions. Lucky for me, Scott is a kind and patient person, and a gifted explainer.

The most surprising thing I learned from Scott is that the computer model 3TIER uses for assessment, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, is a free program produced and constantly improved by government and research institutions. I could download a copy for my laptop. The data set with which we begin each model run also is freely available, a gift to the planet’s people from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP-NCAR).

Of course, amateur that I am, the output from my Home Wind Assessment Kit would be useless hokum, indicating that glaciers had just retreated from my yard. (more…)