Wind Power Curves

This lesson is designed for students who have already learned about wind turbines and power output. It allows students to learn more about turbines and their characteristics through graphs and graphing analysis.

We highly recommend reading the lesson plan before working on this with students. We also recommend that your student have some exposure to wind energy and recording power data before working on this lesson.

 Wind Power Curves (PDF) - 0.5 MB

Bergey XL1

Helpful Links/Materials for this Lesson

WindPower.org - More information on analyzing wind power curves. Detailed with a number of tips at looking at wind curve power data.

INL.gov - Software and power curve files in Excel format for a number of turbine manufacturers. Neat data — but this is definitely for HS and college students.

AWEA - Nice concise piece on how to interpret wind power curves. Also has links to other information about wind turbine data.

Turbine Manufacturer Data

These links will take you to some specification sheets from a variety of small turbine manufactures. You can examine output curves and read more about the characteristics of small wind turbines.

Some major manufacturers of small and large wind turbines include:

• Bergey Windpower
• Southwest Windpower
• Proven Windpower
• GE Windpower
• Vestas
• Suzlon
• Gamesa

These are some direct links to spec sheets:

• http://www.pspb.org/e21/media/Siting_Wind_Power_v112_TN.pdf
• http://entegritywind.com/performance.html