14 DAY TRIAL // A new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters argues that it is possible to considerably improve the performance of offshore wind farms simply by paying closer attention to where each and every turbine sits.
Not to beat about the bush, it seems that staggering (i.e. arranging in a zigzag row) and spacing out the turbines that comprise one such wind farm are bound to up overall efficiency levels by an impressive 33%.
As explained on the official website for the University of Delaware, the researchers concluded that this method of arranging the turbines in an offshore wind farm was by far the best in term of optimizing energy production after carrying out a series of computer simulations.
The specialists who worked on this project started by analyzing the arrangement and the energy production of an offshore wind farm now up and running close to Sweden.
In the case of this grid-like farm, the wind turbines sat fairly close to one another.
Later, the researchers moved to toying with the wind turbines' arrangement in a virtual environment, and, after several weeks of hard work, they found that, when the turbines were staggered and spaced out, performance levels increased by 33%.
“Staggering every other row was amazingly efficient,” researcher Christina Archer with the University of Delaware explains.
They say this is because, when the wind turbines are arranged in this manner, the eddies (i.e. swirls of air) that each of them produces no longer interact with one another in ways that cause losses.
The specialists further detail that, in order to up energy production, wind turbines must face the prevailing wind direction.
The findings of this investigation are expected to be of great use to people who are in the business of designing and building offshore wind farms.
What's more, odds are that environmentalists will rejoice at the news that scientists are helping out improve existing methods of harvesting renewable energy sources.