The Wind tab allows you to select a turbine type, enter costs, and select the number of wind turbines you want HOMER Front to consider.
Select the Turbine Type in the drop-down and enter the Hub Height, in meters. You can set a sensitivity on the Hub Height to view how the height may impact your results. See How HOMER Calculates Wind Turbine Power Output for more details.
Sizing
Enter the total number of wind turbine units you would like to consider in your design. Click the (+) to test multiple options to view how the quantity affects the economics or operation of your system.
Costs
The Costs inputs include the initial Capital cost and annual operation and maintenance (O&M) costs per unit.
When specifying the capital costs, be sure to account for all costs associated with the Wind system.
Note: The capital cost is the initial purchase price and the O&M cost is the annual cost of operating and maintaining the wind turbines.
Note: Below each numerical input is a sensitivity button (
) that allows you to do a sensitivity analysis on that variable. For more information, see Why Would I Do a Sensitivity Analysis?
Losses
Enter specified losses (%) you would like to consider in the provided table. Note - the loss factors are multiplicative rather than additive. See Wind Energy Results for more details.
Wind Resource
There are two options to import wind resource data - download National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) wind resource data or upload your own wind resource data.
To import a file, you must prepare a text file or .csv file that contains the wind speed in each time step for a complete year.
Tip: You can import data with any time step down to one minute. HOMER detects the time step when you import the data file. For example, if the data file contains 8760 lines, HOMER assumes it contains hourly data. If the data file contains 52,560 lines, HOMER assumes it contains 10-minute data.
The data file must contain a single value on each line, corresponding to one time step. Each value in the file represents the average wind speed (in m/s) for that time step. The first time step starts at midnight on January 1st.
After you have uploaded your wind resource data, the annual average (m/s) will be provided in the Annual Average field. You can edit this field or add one or more sensitivities to consider differing wind speeds. HOMER will also use the following to calculate your wind turbine power output.
Variable |
Description |
Altitude |
The altitude in meters above sea level |
Anemometer Height |
The height above ground at which the wind speed data were measured, in meters |
See Also
