Wind Integration Course – June 2010

What can we say?  We had all the windy people together and spent the next 3 days blowing air.  Seriously, we did get into some serious technical discussions about wind modeling specifics and the energy market in general, including:

• How best to model a wind farm – lumped as one equivalent, lumped per feeder or detailed representation?  Some further thoughts on this can be found in Wind Farm Integration: On the Use of Agreggate Models. 
• Trend of cost allocation for system upgrades.  This was not on the course outline but the discussion led in this direction. 
• What is the fair way to represent wind farms in integration studies – 100% capacity for summer peak load conditions or some lower capacity or alternate system loading condition.  More on this in The Coincidence of Wind.

Overall course rating was 4.8 out of 5.0.  Ans, No, we do not watch over their shoulders as they fill in the ratings form.  Some participant comments:

• “Excellent instructors.  Excellent material.” 
• “Very helpful – learned a lot in such a short period of time.”  
• “All spoke loud and clear and were easily understandable.” 
• “The penetration of wind in this country and world, I could have googled it…” 

Google, yes, but informed commentary?  Such a happy group …