Urban deployment of small wind turbines: Power performance and turbulence

The urban terrain and the associated topographical complexities therein, present significant challenges to the deployment of small wind turbines. In particular, a considerable amount of uncertainty is attributable to the lack of understanding concerning how turbulence within urban environments affects turbine productivity. This paper considers how the industry standard metric, turbulence intensity (TI), in conjunction with the power characteristic of a 2.5kW wind turbine, can be employed to estimate turbine power performance. The research presented here considers the potential productivity of a wind turbine installation at two sites in (urban and suburban) Dublin, Ireland where the prevalent turbulence at both locations is considered. The industry metric of TI and the statistical properties of the high resolution wind observations at both locations are utilised to drive two models. The high resolution nature of the wind speed observations facilitates accurate application of Gaussian and Weibull statistics in this regard. The analysis demonstrates that the proposed methodologies could provide a means for installers to accurately predict power performance for a wind turbine based on (wind speed) standard deviation and TI observations.