Wind Turbine Clearance
Modern Wind Turbines routinely reach heights above ground of 200 feet or more, making them potential competitors with microwave beams for particular points in space.
When turbines are being planned in an area, Micronet identifies surrounding terrestrial microwave and land mobile facilities and runs a clearance analysis to establish whether or not a planned turbine will potentially block an existing licensed microwave path.
For the sake of an illustrative analysis, a cluster of wind turbines located Southeast of Abilene, TX have been selected. When specific locations are known, as in the selected group, Micronet will create a bounding box that includes them, as shown here.
From this zoom level, the wind turbines appear as yellow push pins. The violet lines represent the various microwave paths in the area. In the following image, the user can see by inspection that the wind turbines are not in close proximity to any microwave paths traversing the bounding box.
At a high zoom level, as shown in the following screen image, the individual wind turbines are modeled as spheres on masts, allowing the analysis to take into account the fact that wind turbines turn in azimuth to meet the oncoming wind.
If the locations of either planned or actual wind turbines are not known, the client can provide a specified area in the form of a bounding box, and Micronet will run the analysis on that basis.
In that event, Micronet will identify any microwave and/or land mobile facilities that may pose a conflict with the wind turbines planned for the area within the bounding box.
For each analysis, Micronet provides the following outputs:
- KMZ file that can run on either Google Earth or NASA World Wind
- Shapefiles for the Bounding box, Microwave paths, Microwave Fresnel zones, and Land Mobile Radio facilities.