How to lease your land to a wind energy developer?
Saturday, July 25th, 2009 at
9:29 am
my parents own land in Upstate New York, I was wondering how to go about leasing said land to a wind energy developer?
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Tagged with: leasing • parents • upstate new york • Wind Energy
Filed under: Wind Energy
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The top wind power companies have meteorologists on staff that would run long term weather models on small supercomputer clusters in order to predict the amount of useful energy that can be extracted in various locations and superimpose this information on GIS data so that they know the availability of transmission lines, road and rail access, and property ownerships before they open negotiations on a property. Having this information on your land and on competing properties can be a major advantage during negotiations.
The software to model the weather is WRF and is open source although it’s a tricky package to use. The company that I know of, used to pay $500,000 per simulation run from a weather modeling company so we set up a small supercomputer cluster for them for about $300,000 and they’ve been running their own simulations ever since, one run pays for the equipment. This has allowed them to play with various boundary conditions and fine tune their models for a more appropriate interpretation of expected energy resources. They want to quadruple their compute resources but that entails more space, power and air conditioning.
You may be able to get the local university to help do a simulation run on the area around your property but it’s really the experience and expertise of the meteorologists to select and refine the boundary parameters and interpret the results. The software also runs on your laptop, under Linux, just slowly with only one computer.
You would want to contact your local power company first of all. Then there are a few things that would factor into making it happen. Is the land close to power lines ? Is the wind fairly sustainable ? Would their be much for the power company to realise a profit from this venture ? And how much land are you talking about ? Just some of the questions they would have to answer before anything could happen