Interested students and faculty can learn more about the competition and the application requirements by visiting the FedBizOpps listing.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) plans to issue a Request for Proposal in mid-September for colleges and universities interested in participating in DOE’s Collegiate Wind Competition 2021, which is designed to help prepare students from a variety of backgrounds for a career in wind energy.

By March 2020, organizers will select up to 12 collegiate teams to compete in the challenge, which will be co-located with the American Wind Energy Association’s (AWEA) CLEANPOWER Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana, or held at NREL’s Flatirons Campus in Colorado in the spring of 2021.

Teams will need to design, build, and test a model wind turbine that can stand up to the challenge of a massive wind tunnel and plan, financially analyze, and present research on a wind plant.

The post NREL prepping for 2021 Collegiate Wind Competition proposals appeared first on Windpower Engineering & Development.

NREL’s experimental design for the wake steering field campaign incorporated lidar measurements of atmospheric conditions. (Photo by Andrew Scholbrock; NREL)

With funding from the Department of Energy, the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) has developed the FLOw Redirection and Induction in Steady State (FLORIS) model to help wind plant operators optimize turbine interactions. This open-source software lets users design controllers that can choose the best yaw angles for wind-turbine operation under different conditions. (Read more here.)

Over the past few years, NREL researchers have conducted several small-scale campaigns to validate FLORIS predictions. One and two-turbine studies at NREL’s National Wind Technology Center in Boulder, Colorado, and the Scaled Wind Farm Technology (SWiFT) facility in Lubbock, Texas, contributed to FLORIS updates.

Another single-turbine experiment at a commercial offshore facility provided additional insights into optimal configurations.

“There is no shortage of interest in applying this approach,” said NREL Senior Engineer Paul Fleming, who leads the laboratory’s wind farm control research. “But before we can see controls adopted at scale, the industry needs to see field trials that are conducted in realistic environments.”

To fill this gap, Fleming and colleagues recently designed a study to bring increased clarity to wind plant control research. The team incorporated a range of sensing equipment — including a ground-based lidar, meteorological tower, and two sodars — at subsection of the Peetz Wind Energy Center during the three-month-long field study.

“Our experimental setup used specific instrumentation to gather additional data points, which greatly increased our ability to analyze the accuracy of simulated predictions,” Fleming said.

The post NREL field trials validate wind-turbine wake steering impacts appeared first on Windpower Engineering & Development.

DOE’s Collegiate Wind Competition is one program that connects university students with the wind industry and provides hands-on experience. (Photo: Werner Slocum, NREL)

A new report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) assesses the national wind energy workforce and the hiring needs of the industry.

Entitled, “The Wind Energy Workforce in the United States: Training, Hiring, and Future Needs,”PD the report reviews the educational programs that are preparing students for work.

According to the NREL, the researchers interviewed educational institutions offering wind programs, as well as industry representatives, to identify gaps in the workforce and path to employment.

The goal: “To better understand the wind industry workforce, hiring needs, and educational pathways, researchers surveyed wind industry employers and educational institutions that offered degrees or certificates in wind energy or renewable energy with some coursework dedicated to wind,” states the report’s Executive Summary.

Here are a few of the findings:

• Across the country, students are entering wind-related educational programs, and jobs are available in the industry.
• Hiring companies are not finding qualified applicants for open entry-level positions, and students are not being offered jobs that allow them to enter the industry. Researchers refer to this disparity as the “wind energy workforce gap.”
• While some programs — such as the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Collegiate Wind Competition — are available to connect students with industry representatives and provide real-world experience, more solutions are needed to prepare students to enter the wind energy workforce.
• The industry needs people with entry to advanced-level skillsets (in areas such as project development, component manufacturing, construction, operations, education, training, and research). The required education levels for these positions range from high school degrees to vocational degrees and apprenticeships to doctorate degrees — highlighting the need to evaluate wind education programs along the academic spectrum.
• The report highlights wind energy workforce gaps and proposes the need for creative solutions to meet the needs of job-seeking students and a growing industry.
• Narrowing this workforce gap—decreasing hiring difficulty while increasing graduates’ ability to find jobs in the industry—could reduce recruiting costs, better satisfy employer needs, and grow the domestic wind workforce.
• In addition to assessing the current state of the wind industry’s workforce and training, the report looks ahead to future needs of the industry and the potential education programs needed to support its growth.

Download the full report here. 

The post NREL addresses the wind energy workforce gap appeared first on Windpower Engineering & Development.