ArcVera is a participant in the Wind Plant Performance Prediction (WP3) Benchmark project, a U.S. Department of Energy-funded industry collaboration. Led by The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the project is a validation exercise for wind farm pre-construction energy assessments and its membership includes owners/developers, consultants and OEMs. WP3 represents an unprecedented platform for data sharing and wind industry advancement including pre-construction and operational data from up to 100 or more modern operational wind projects. Since the 2017 pilot and through Phase One (10 projects), we have fulfilled each project mandate set by NREL with rigor and timeliness. ArcVera was the only participant in WP3 to complete all 10 Phase One projects by the November 2018 deadline; other consultants were four months or more late delivering their results.
We engage in our own benchmarking — to validate and document the quality of ArcVera wind energy resource assessment (WERA) practices. Our Wind Energy Resource Assessment Benchmark study, which compares pre-construction assessments using our current practices to post-construction energy production, is ongoing. Its third publication, in January 2019, now encompasses 31 projects. Once again, the results of the study quantitatively prove that our current techniques are accurate to within 1% on average, of reported project P50 wind energy production, with lower project performance variation and, therefore, lower risk of production performance error.
