2. Site assessment
Before investing into a small wind turbine the customer wants to be sure that his investment makes sense financially and needs detailed wind data for that. Wind maps are inadequate for this purpose as local effects influence the wind characteristic of a site. Therefore, it is recommendable to measure the wind on site. INENSUS developed the aeolog wind and solar monitoring system for this purpose. Small wind turbine sales companies purchase a number of systems and hire them out to their potential customers. The whole system including mast can be shipped by parcel services in a single box. The end customer can set the system up without additional support within 45 minutes. The data logger automatically starts recording the data. After three months the mast is put back into the boc and send to the wind turbine sales company. The measured data is extrapolated to a whole year using reference data e.g. from a nearby weather station and applied to a wind turbine power curve to derive an estimated energy yield. The data measured also provides some important information for the choice of the wind turbine.
To produce suitable data it is important to choose a site which is outside of turbulence areas. As a rule of thumb you can say that you should choose a height which is higher than the highest obstacle in a circumference of 200 m radius.