Atmospheric and Climate Science Directorate

[Contents] [PDF] [Previous] [Next]

Making Wind Energy an Attractive Option for the Future

The Wind Energy Simulation Toolkit

If you’ve ever stood out on the prairies, or in the foothills, or on an ocean-side beach, you have felt the potential power of wind energy for generating electricity. The contribution of wind energy to electricity production in Canada is steadily increasing.

Technology to generate electricity from wind has improved significantly over the past 30 years to the point that several electricity companies in Canada, both large and small, have begun to add “wind farms” to their electrical generation capabilities. Large utilities, like Alberta’s TransAlta Corporation, foresee up to 10% of their electricity generated by wind turbines in the future. The federal government’s Wind Power Production Incentive Program has received proposals far exceeding the initial scope of the program.

Wind may be free, but the technology to convert it to electricity certainly is not. The capital investment required for wind turbines and electricity generators is significant. In addition, short-term operational decisions on buying or selling, generating or importing electricity are key to the economic sustainability of power generation companies. The very nature of electricity demand and generation is very sensitive to weather conditions. It is critical for electric power companies to know when, where and how much they can count on wind energy to provide electricity. This is where the Meteorological Service of Canada’s MSC Energy Simulation Toolkit expertise comes to the fore. MSC scientists have developed a complex modelling system called WEST – the Wind Energy Simulation Toolkit. WEST can look backward and forward in time to generate a wind atlas for any location in Canada with unparalleled detail. A wind atlas can be used to site wind farms in appropriately windy locations, dramatically reducing the need for field observations to verify the wind energy potential of a given area. WEST can also be run in predictive mode using the meso-scale model MC₂ (Meso-scale Compressible Community Model) to forecast wind power up to two to three days in advance, enabling better operational decisions to be made by electricity generators.

Sophisticated software like WEST, coupled with the newest wind turbine technology will continue to make wind energy an even more attractive option for the future. WEST will help Canada achieve an environmentally responsible and cost-effective approach to electricity generation that will result in a reduction in the use of fossil fuels for cleaner electricity generation.

[View] (D)

A forecast of wind power for the Cowley Ridge Castle River wind farm in southwest Alberta, produced using MSC’s WEST (Wind Energy Simulation Toolkit) and the Canadian Meteorological Centre’s MC2 Community Model.

“WEST enabled us to model wind power potential for the entire African continent, from our offices in Montreal, using existing data.The results far exceeded anything we could have done using other models.” Richard Legault CEO Helimax Energy

The Green Lane^TM,
Environment Canada's World Wide Web Site.