Case Study: National Renewable Energy Laboratory accelerates wind turbine wake research with Plotly Dash

National Renewable Energy Laboratory boosts wind farm energy production by up to 2.5% with Plotly

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) needed to accelerate research into a novel wind farm control method called wake steering, which faced barriers to adoption due to uncertainty around its physical impacts. To overcome this, they sought to build a more accessible and interactive tool for researchers and operators. They used Plotly's Dash to develop a solution.

Using Plotly's Dash and Python, a single NREL engineer built a custom preprocessing interface for their FLORIS wind farm simulator. This solution allowed researchers to instantly adjust parameters and rerun wake steering models, reducing the time to understand new models from days to a single day. The analysis of these simulations identified new wind power opportunities, resulting in a potential 2.5% increase in annual energy production, enough to power an additional 8,000 homes from a single large wind farm.

National Renewable Energy Laboratory