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Comment by enricobruschini | Hacker News Reader

There are many more step forward the wind energy industry can still see. Not only incremental ones. Before moving to SF I was at Energie Etiche, an Italian startup that is bringing to the market an innovative wind assessment software. By cutting the preliminary wind assessment time from 18 to 3 months and the relative costs from $15k to $2k-$4k it's possible to open up the whole "Small Wind Market" (aka <100KW)

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Check out "Wind Prospector", which has a zoomable map and a wind model for the entire United States.[1] It uses a climatic model and topography data to calculate wind power potential. Spend a few minutes with that and you can see where the wind industry can and can't grow. For the US, the big potential is offshore and in the area due north of the Texas panhandle. California has four good onshore wind sites, and all have big wind farms already.

[1] https://maps.nrel.gov/wind-prospector

Yes, this is one of the possible approach to the wind assessment challenge. Unfortunately it is not accurate below 250ft, the wind is not linear and this kind of model doesn't count well enough all the obstacles at the low altitudes. Therefore this model doesn't work for the <100KW turbines and when it comes to >100KW, the investment is so big that you still want an on-site-specific wind assessment. In conclusion this service is useful only for curiosity or for preliminary observations

Local variations can be huge so you are spot on that for any site that expects to produce power a local assessment is a must. Even so a chart like that helps to determine whether or not going for windpower makes sense at all and how much you can (on average) expect to get out of it indicating what your 'mix' of renewables should be to ensure year-round power, which is especially important for off-grid installations.

That's really neat! You can see the location of every windfarm and tier within the U.S. It even has info for HI and AK!

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