Wind Energy Education through Low-Power Wind Turbines and Advanced Software Tools

Abstract

Wind energy has become a major source of power generation in recent years. This fact, along with the growing expectations for future decades, makes the study of renewable generation systems based on wind energy a subject of great importance for engineers from different disciplines. Although there are numerous research articles that deal with the techno-economic aspects of this type of system, there are few works focused on the development of new didactic strategies to improve the academic excellence of undergraduate engineering students. This paper describes how to boost the student understanding regarding wind power generation by combining the use of advanced software tools normally used in the design of wind farms, such as System Advisor Model (National Renewable Energy Laboratory, NREL) and Wind Farm (RESOFT) with low power wind turbines operating in self-consumption and grid connected modes. Moreover, it is also described how wind turbines constitute an interesting option for distributed generation system in micro grids.