NREL Mobilizes Dash for Wind Turbine Wake Research

Wake steering is a wind farm control method that can increase annual energy production and reduce costs, however, the practice faces barriers to adoption by industry. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) turned to Dash to create visualization tools that accelerate research into wake steering and its impacts.

A single engineer using Python and Dash built the FLOw Redirection and Induction in Steady State (FLORIS) app for use at NREL, where it has provided insight into new wind power opportunities. Additionally, NREL made the source code public, promoting its adoption at other national research organizations and within the private sector.

Download this user story to learn how:

• FLORIS uses Dash’s modular, component-based framework to prototype the custom interface within days and produce a complete app in weeks.
• The preprocessing interface enables researchers to instantly rerun wake steering models and test hypotheses faster.
• Analysis of FLORIS outputs identified new wind power opportunities across the United States, resulting in up to a 2.5% increase in annual energy production (A single, 10,000-megawatt wind farm could power an additional 8,000 North American homes with such gains.)

"Dash allows us to adjust model parameters directly in the application and rerun them in real time. This has helped us build an intuition for exactly how parameters affect the model. Whereas the typical process for understanding a new model can take many days, using Dash enables us to get visual feedback and understand a model within a single day.” -Rafael Mudafort, FLORIS software engineer, NREL