DTU’s software WAsP can forecast the amount of energy produced by a wind turbine. Hence, the programme is of vital importance to the development of the wind turbine industry. The software can map the wind resources anywhere – knowledge, which is necessary to find out how much electricity a wind turbine is producing.
Great importance for investments in windfarms
Since the launch of WAsP 30 years ago, the programme has become a standard tool for the wind turbine industry. The programme is used worldwide for calculations on the wind resources in order to assess the yield of wind turbines and wind farms.
Reliable calculations are crucial for the certainty for investors to yield a profit of their investments in e.g. a wind farm. The lower risk of the project, the lower interest rate on the loan at banks and investors. Thus, reliable calculations may lead to easier and cheaper financing of projects.
User-friendly and widely used programme
During the last 10 years the number of companies using WAsP has doubled. In 2007, there were 2600 registered users and today there are approx. 5000 customers all over the world and the programme has been exported to more than 120 countries. One of them is the internationally Leading Consulting Group COWI.
They are very fond of WAsP:
“We have used WAsP almost since it was launched and it is one of our must used programmes. We use WAsP to make our energy calculations on sites for future wind farms all over the world. The good thing about WAsP is that it is relatively simple to use, and the calculations are quickly made and thus, it’s easy to change the layout and try to make various possibilities”, says specialist within Wind and Industry in COWI Cecilie Langhans.
WAsP is easy to use for the customers. It is found in a version that can be used in Windows on any desktop PC. It can utilise measured or model-derived wind data, together with the newest elevation and land cover data from space shuttles and satellites. “With WAsP it is possible to predict the wind resources anywhere on the earth”, says Niels Gylling Mortensen, senior researcher at DTU Wind Energy.
Department of Wind Energy is experiencing an increase in the global use of WAsP for development of wind farms and mapping of the wind. Customers from the whole world are contacting the department with questions, thus increasing the number of consultancy tasks and second opinion studies. Many of the department’s projects within research-based consultancy are using WAsP today.
The future of WAsP
The next step in the development of WAsP is to create models that can be integrated with other software and used in new constellations. Senior researcher, Andreas Bechmann, at DTU Wind Energy says that it is necessary partly because the models need to be used together with the software that the industry develop, but most importantly because the models need to be automated. If this is doable, it will be possible to predict the uncertainty of the estimate. And a certain estimate means lower expenses when financing projects.
Please read more about WAsP in Dynamo 17, Dynamo 34 (both in Danish) or on www.wasp.dk.