The Department of Energy’s Wind Energy Technologies Office (WETO) is working with scientists at the national laboratories and in academia and industry to glean a better understanding of how to optimize wind plant power production through the Atmosphere to Electrons—or A2e—program. A2e seeks to transform today’s wind plant operations using modeling, analysis, and simulation, while also developing strategies and technologies to limit wind farm losses and cut operational costs.

PNNL’s data portal powerhouse

PNNL data integration scientists support the A2e effort by managing a key capability—the Data Archive and Portal (DAP)—for WETO. This portal is designed to collect, store, curate, catalog, preserve, and disseminate the massive amounts of experimental and computational results generated by research performed under the A2e program.

The DAP provides researchers, wind plant owners, consultants, and wind turbine owners with secure, timely, easy, and open access to all laboratory, field, and benchmark model data and offshore data produced by the A2e program.

Specifically, it provides the wind research community with easy discovery of and access to publicly available data, long-term data preservation, and secure authorized access to proprietary data. The portal also allows for automated data collection from field studies, data monitoring and visualization, and standardized data sets for easy analysis.

Access is given to both model and observational data. These include data from remote sensing systems, such as sodar, radar, and lidar as well as in situ measurements of basic meteorological and oceanographic variables. In addition, the DAP also stores benchmark model output. The portal preserves data using PNNL’s Onsite Research Computing and Cloud resources.

As of early 2020, 796 users have accessed the DAP’s nearly 500 data sets. The portal stores 20 million files and 105 publications—more than 242 terabytes of data dating back to 2000.

The DAP is helping to bridge the knowledge gap among data collectors, modelers, and data users. The data it contains are helping wind plant owners and consultants make decisions about where to locate wind turbines, optimize energy production from wind, and evaluate wake effects from wind plants.

Finally, the DAP is helping to increase the wind industry’s confidence in its ability to securely share its proprietary data while also maximizing the use of federal resources by providing access to large field data sets.