OU WEAVes new project to capture wind's energy

Long thought to be short on potential for wind power, southeast Ohio now has its first-ever wind-monitoring program up and running thanks to Ohio University's Russ College of Engineering and assistant engineering professor Carole Womeldorf.

Womeldorf spearheads the Wind Energy Assessment and Visualization, or WEAV program, at the college, which has now begun the collection of the first tall-towers wind data in Appalachian Ohio at heights of up to 800 feet.

The kick-off of this two-year project Tuesday at OU's Voinovich School represents the first full-scale wind-data collection program for the region. Data collected for wind speed, direction, temperature and pressure will be combined with local terrain information to create accurate regional wind maps to identify the very best wind-energy resources within a 2,000-square-mile region surrounding Athens, including parts of Meigs, Morgan, Perry, Vinton, Washington and Hocking counties according to the project leaders.

Womeldorf said the goal of the project is to find the best places for wind-energy development in the region.

"Everybody will tell you that there's no wind in southeast Ohio," Womeldorf said, but already her research is beginning to debunk that notion.

Back in 1986, southeast Ohio had been essentially written off as a resource for wind energy, according to federal maps Womeldorf showed during her introduction to the project. Even in updated maps that Womeldorf showed from 2004 the power of wind in southeast Ohio appeared to be underestimated. She said this is due in part to a lack of data.

So to gather more data, Womeldorf's study is taking advantage of the WOUB television tower near Radford Road and Ohio Rt. 56, which stands over 800 feet tall, by placing data-collection sensors at various levels.

"With the upper-level data, we're getting above all those variations closer to the ground," Womeldorf said. "And now, with a wind-simulator computer model putting in the terrain models, knowing what the upper-level values are, we're going to be able to make a prediction about what's happening down below."

This study, Womeldorf explained, will use measurements taken from the WOUB tower at six different levels on 12 wind-speed measurement anemometers and six directional vanes.

"We are going to be producing a lot of data," she said. "Every 10 minutes worth of data for every single censor will be stored for the full two years."

The directional vanes will figure out where the winds are coming from. Meanwhile, the wind speeds are averaged and then put into wind-simulator software designed for the complex local terrain to make new wind maps and identify the top 1 percent wind-resource areas for this region.

By surveying an area of more than 2,000 square miles, the top 1 percent represents more than 20 square miles, Womeldorf pointed out.

"Twenty square miles can host over 100 82-meter-diameter, 1.5-megawatt GE wind turbines," Womeldorf said. "They can create energy for over 55,000 houses... And that's really not pushing my numbers too much. That's taking some pretty low estimates."

The project is really looking for the best places where the wind speeds up due to the topography of the area, she said.

Womeldorf said she has received help from students at the university who have taken her classes in wind energy, and that the project is being funded primarily through the Appalachian Regional Commission. She also thanks WOUB for donating the tower space.

Athens County Commissioner Lenny Eliason said that the commissioners had to sign off on the grant and did so due to Womeldorf's persistence.

"Southeast Ohio really has a history of extraction," Eliason said. "We always send away our natural resources... our gas, our oil, our coal, our timber. We mine it. We harvest it. We ship it. We don't keep it here. We don't renew it. So having renewable energy is a big step toward the future."

Being able to capture renewable energy, he said, is important for everyone, especially in terms of job creation.

"Ohio is a leader in making parts for wind turbines, but we're not a leader in manufacturing," Eliason said. "So when you look at manufacturing opportunities in the future, Ohio is greatly situated in the country to be a distribution center."

This is an important factor when renewable-energy technology such as solar and wind comes into play, he said.

Russ College Dean Dennis Irwin emphasized that the research OU has been doing on alternative energy is multi-disciplinary, involving several colleges and several different programs.

He said researchers at OU have received almost $30 million in outside funding to develop alternative energy technologies.

"So what we want to do is provide value-added for the people of the state of Ohio in particular. We believe that we're doing that," he said. "If we can demonstrate the feasibility of wind power, for example, in southeast Ohio... then you as taxpayers have given us money, we have invested it for you and you have gotten a return on the investment."