With the announcement of the new release of the German standard for wind turbines (DIBt 2012 Richtlinie für Windenergieanlagen) a couple of changes were introduced regarding the assessment of the site suitability of a wind turbine (WT) in Germany.

At WT sites which are not topographical complex (i.e. very hilly or mountainous) things only slightly change. But at complex sites further investigations are required in addition to the assessment of turbulence intensity. Therefore, the topographical complexity becomes a key parameter for site suitability assessment within the new German standard. Once the DIBt 2012 standard is introduced in a federal state it has to be applied - independently of the actual type approval of the new planned WT.

Within this new version of wake2e we therefore revised the assessment of topographical complexity.

The sector wise orography parameters will still be used to calculate the effective turbulence intensities and were only slightly adjusted. For the assessment of the topographical complexity of a WT site according to DIBt 2012 a second assessment loop was introduced which takes into account the amount of energy in the wind. If a WT site is assessed to be topographical complex according to DIBt 2012, a warning sign will now be attached to the WT symbol in the map.

In case the new planned WT has a type approval according to DIBt 2012 (or this is intended) a higher ambient turbulence intensity compared to the DIBt 2004 standard has to be applied. This has been addressed in the new version of wake2e as well.

Within the new version of wake2e you can now assign reference heights to multiple wind data sets. So far it was assumed that every data set refers to the hub height of the WT to which it has been assigned when using multiple wind data sets. The new option allows you to use the same wind data set for several WTs which have different hub heights. The option to provide wind data in form of frequency matrices was dropped in this context.

We hope you like the new features and we are looking forward to your feedback.

Best regards

Your F2E-team