Quantification of the Risk of Extreme Weather for Wind Energy Systems for Insurance Markets

Gulf Wind Technology proposes to develop a Hurricane Wind Turbine Risk Analysis method intended for use by the energy insurance industry. This work will combine inputs from the Risk Assessment Framework for Tropical Cyclones model into aeroelastic simulations of representative design load cases, into a confidence-weighted ensemble averaging approach to assess turbine damage. The body of work seeks to overcome industry-wide challenges related to numerical and other instabilities in the simulation of these load cases through novel aerodynamic approaches and ensemble averaging methods common today in meteorology. If awarded, Phase II would yield further refinement of the proof-of-concept Phase I model based on state-of-the-art understanding of the hurricane boundary layer and simulation tools, a broader library of wind turbines, as well as wind tunnel modeling for improved inputs.