Wind Workforce Development Series

The Wind Workforce Development Series places students and educators in a virtual classroom where they can connect with today's foremost experts in wind energy technologies.

This webinar series grew out of the 2019 Wind for Schools Summit, in which participants asked for tools and curricula to enhance university-level wind energy education. The webinar series covers topics of interest collected from Wind Application Centers, universities offering wind or renewable energy courses, and professionals in the industry.

One of many ways NREL helps prepare the wind workforce of our energy future, the Wind Workforce Development Series is designed to enhance learning activities at educational institutions and to inspire future wind energy innovators with contemporary research and development challenges from the industry.

Upcoming Webinars

No webinars are planned at this time. For more information about upcoming webinars, including how to register or to suggest a webinar topic, contact Ram Poudel.

Webinar Archives

This webinar, Extremum Seeking Control of Wind Energy Systems, provides an overview of the work done at the University of Texas at Dallas in model-free control of wind turbines and wind plants. An extremum seeking control may be used to improve the power production of existing turbines in the field. Mario Rotea shows how the turbines' extremum seeking controls may be coordinated to maximize the total power production of aerodynamically coupled turbines via wake steering.

Paul Denholm, a principal energy analyst with NREL's Grid Systems Group, presents the webinar, Grid Services From the Modern Wind Turbines: Engineering and Economics, using examples from independent system operators across the United States. He shares the idea of a market structure that gives wind and solar the opportunity to solve grid challenges.

Mark Z. Jacobson discusses roadmaps Stanford University has developed to transition cities, states, and countries to 100% energy from wind, water, solar, and storage in the webinar Impacts of 100% Wind-Water-Solar Roadmaps for the United States on Grid Stability, Costs, Jobs, Health, and Climate. Mark focuses on the technical and economic feasibility of those transitions.

Tom Acker (Northern Arizona University) and Greg Stark (NREL) present a webinar on Integrated Energy Systems at Scale: Wind and Hydro Integration. Tom gives an overview of the electrical system with reference to the wind and hydro integration, and Greg presents three recent studies of variable renewable energy contribution levels ranging from 47% to 100%.

Eric Simley and Andrew Scholbrock of NREL present a two-part webinar on lidar, a remote-sensing device used in wind energy applications. Part I discusses lidar measurement principles, and Part II features nacelle-based lidar applications.

In the webinar, Wind Flow Modeling over a Complex Terrain Using Continuum 3.0, Liz Walls, creator and developer of a reduced-order wind flow model based on Navier-Stokes, describes the new features available in the open-source version of Continuum 3.0.

In this webinar, XTurb – A Wind Turbine Design and Analysis Tool, Sven Schmitz of Penn State University gives an overview of the XTurb code as used for the wind turbine aerodynamics courses at Penn State. XTurb is an aerodynamics-focused tool that includes both blade-element momentum method and helicoidal vortex method. This webinar gives an overview of on-going efforts at Penn State and also provides a unique inverse design method under constraints.

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