Wind turbines, weather radar duel over Dodge County
Wind turbines and Doppler radar are silently dueling in the skies over Dodge County, meteorologists say.
Butler Ridge, a new energy wind farm in east-central Dodge County, is interfering with the Weather Surveillance Doppler Radar at the Sullivan office in eastern Jefferson County, said Marc Ravinsky, senior meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Sullivan.
Visual noise from the 36 wind turbines could mask or distort severe weather taking place in the same area, Ravinsky said. That could reduce the effectiveness of storm warnings in the vicinity, he said.
The Butler Ridge wind farm, which began operation in February, is in the town of Herman, about 60 miles northeast of Madison and about 30 miles directly north of the radar at the Sullivan weather service office.
“Unfortunately, the Butler Ridge wind farm and its turbines are within the radar line of sight of the NWS Doppler radar in eastern Jefferson County,” Ravinsky said.
The 400-foot wind turbine rotors and the motion of the blades reflect back a small part of the radar’s electromagnetic energy. The radar processes the echo as precipitation and plots it on the map, so the wind farm could be mistaken for a storm system, he said.
Ed Blume, spokesman for RENEW Wisconsin, a nonprofit renewable energy advocacy group based in Madison, said the conflict between radar and wind farms needs to be resolved.
“Wind energy will make up probably 90 percent of the renewable energy needed to satisfy renewable energy standards set by the state,” Blume said. “And with wind turbines, they must be located in a windy location.”
Ravinsky said the Doppler radar has sophisticated software that removes clutter like trees and buildings that have little or no motion. “Unfortunately, the radar sees the rotating wind turbine blades as targets having reflectivity and motion, hence processes these returns as weather,” he said.
Ravinsky said he hopes new computer programs will be developed that can adjust for moving non- weather echoes like wind turbine rotors.
“It is only affecting a small part of the radar beam,” Ravinsky said, “I am hoping that it isn’t going to have much effect.”
The wind farm is owned by Eurus Energy America Inc./Babcock and Brown Power, an Australian power company. Attempts to reach someone there who is knowledgeable about Butler Ridge were unsuccessful.
WPPI Energy, which delivers power in Iowa, Wisconsin and Michigan, purchases about 40 percent of the power generated by Butler Ridge for use by more than 50 municipal utilities in Wisconsin.
The radar concerns are not new. In 2006, Butler Ridge and the Forward project, a 133-turbine development near the Horicon Marsh, were stalled by worries that the turbines would interfere with military radar, but the Federal Aviation Administration finally gave the go-ahead.
By Patricia Simms
11 April 2009
Tags: Wind power, Wind energy
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