Loss Factors for Small Distributed Wind Turbines Based on Field Data in the United States: Article No. e260002

While wind energy production loss due to turbine unavailability, environmental impacts, curtailment, and other causes has been studied and characterized at the utility-scale wind farm level, observation-based characterization of project loss is lacking for distributed wind energy, particularly for projects involving small wind turbines. Contemporary tools and research that support pre-construction distributed wind energy characterization present a wide range of default loss factors to convert gross energy estimates to net: 7-18%. Our goal is to use generation observations from operational distributed wind projects to develop more accurate representations of energy loss, along with an improved understanding of year-to-year loss variability, for this understudied sector of wind energy. Using a density-based filtering technique on distributed wind power generation timeseries, we determine periods of typical performance and use them with regression algorithms in a measure-correlate-predict fashion to simulate what the generation would have been during periods of atypical or unreported performance. From there, the actual versus predicted generation leads to the establishment of observation-informed loss factors (median = 17%) for small, single turbine installation distributed wind projects.