There are now four blog posts on aeolians.net, and I thought it was the time to provide my dear reader(s) with some invaluable input regarding the content of the blog. This post is mostly a cover-up for typos, approximations, bad grammar and sketchy statements.
The blog has three main purposes:
- Share a bunch of documents which I think are very cool, informative and fun about the “short history” of site assessment for wind energy.
- Shed some modest light on some particular studies or initiatives, which are not widely known.
- Map in time and space, the connections between the different fields of science and engineering, that have been shaping site assessment work in the early days.
An by early days I mean:
- For Europe: prior to the EWEC 1986 in Rome.
- For the USA: prior to the creation of NREL.
- For the rest of the world: it depends !
For that purpose, you will find so far, aside of the regular blog posts:
- A file repository with an non-exhaustive set of documents gathered so far (ask me if you don’t find something).
- An interactive* timeline, showing the documents in context and perspective.
- A gallery with pictures I think are cool.
- (tentative future plan) A map with the location of sites, companies and labs, etc.
My approach is, I hope, without pretense. It just helps me understand better my professional field. Wind and site engineers are, in their vast majority, pretty enthusiastic about their job, eager to share what they have learnt, and a good mix of international nerds of all ages. It is generally pretty hard to explain what it’s all about, and pretty easy to tell after few minutes talking, if someone belongs to the community or not, at least from my experience :P.
I am not pretending to be able to produce scientific statements and general truths, I’d like of course, when time will allow, to provide some technical insight into some of the papers I’ll be discussing; however there is usually always a good scientific paper that can be used as reference. So i’ll try to focus instead on sharing stuff I regard as interesting, in a friendly manner.
Another hobby of mine is to read papers and books about epistemology (how do we know that we know stuff, and what is knowing stuff btw), more specifically about meteorology, climate models and natural sciences. That does not mean I understand what is in it, but it may explain a general tone of the blog, having to do with trying to figure out what we know, how we got to know what we know, and from an engineering perspective, how we ended up using the tools we are using. For instance, I find fascinating that the great Lissaman, already in 1977, made a very elegant and clear formulation of the dependency of the wake decay parameter to the ambient turbulence. He used his engineering talent to combine together plume dispersion, jet theory and rotor aerodynamics, in order to produce a calculaltion tool that could calculate wake losses in various and very fancy ways. It is my impression that sometimes I have a bit too many of those “constants” and “classically reported” values in mind, without knowing where those come from.
A derivative of taking this epistemologal tone**, is that I have the tendency to utter general statements on how this knowledge was produced and used in the industry. For instance that’s the case when I attempt to compare WaSP and AVFARM. It is simply difficult not to think about what happened after those times, and although it biases the analyis, I believe this helps me primarly to reflect on my daily work at the office, what models I use, what the standards are based on, how are things in reality at the site, and how to best help the projects we work on (hopefully this works).
Eventually, working on daily basis with wind and waves, looking into the atmospheric boundary layer and above, is just very cool I think. I’m not a big fan of flying, I must have taken a plane for the first time when I travelled first to Denmark when I was 22. I always prefer landing than taking off, and like to tell myself “ah, good to be back in the boundary layer“. So it’s no surprise I don’t dislike my job, I guess.
Comments and/or suggestions are welcome,
Rémi
*wow
**I should write this in French Script, how pedantic 😛
