A new research effort led by NOAA and the Department of Energy, with help from CIRES and other partners, will play a significant role in the development of wind energy off of the New England coast. 

Wind power is an essential source of renewable energy, but it’s a variable power source, dependent on weather conditions. Electric grid operators keep the grid stable by balancing the variable amount of power produced from wind farms by increasing or decreasing power from fossil fuel generation stations as wind increases and subsides. An economic study has shown that improvements to NOAA’s operational weather prediction models, which are used to make decisions on the different sources of energy generation, can save the electrical utilities hundreds of millions of dollars per year, which has associated savings for ratepayers. 

That’s why NOAA and the Department of Energy, together with CIRES and other academic and industry partners, are launching the third Wind Forecast Improvement Project (WFIP-3), a two-year investigation of wind and weather conditions in a coastal region from Nantucket off Massachusetts to Block Island off Rhode Island.

In early November, researchers from NOAA’s Physical Sciences and Global Monitoring laboratories, several DOE labs, universities, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, installed 20 different meteorological instruments on Nantucket and Block Island, with additional instruments on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, and in Narragansett, Rhode Island. 

These weather monitoring stations will be complemented in 2024 by additional instruments being installed on buoys and a large barge to capture wind data from the water’s surface that will be located closer to where the offshore wind turbines are being installed. 

Read more about this research project on NOAA Research.