Wind Research
Technology Innovation

Technology Innovation

NREL experts pioneered many of the capabilities that have taken wind energy to new heights.

Instrumented gearbox at the National Wind Technology Center.

NREL's computer modeling and experimental capabilities, as well as our deep staff expertise, are guiding wind technologies from initial concepts to deployment. We develop enhanced designs and prognostic technologies that aim to reduce operations and maintenance costs by increasing turbine reliability and plant availability. Whether investigating innovative wind turbine systems and configurations or developing new plant-level control operations, our team has a research portfolio spanning the entire technology innovation pipeline.

Capabilities

Next-Generation Technologies Innovation and Validation

Premature failures of drivetrain components—including pitch and main bearings, gearboxes, and generators—have a significant impact on the cost of wind power plant operations and maintenance. NREL develops and verifies advanced drivetrain concepts and innovative bearing, gearbox, and generator technologies.

Wind turbine blade failures are an extremely rare occurrence, but when they do happen, the results can be catastrophic. For this reason, blade manufacturers require tests of blade properties, static mechanical tests, and fatigue tests to certify wind blade and wind turbine designs. In addition to full-scale blade validation, National Wind Technology Center facilities have extensive capabilities to perform small- to large-scale subcomponent tests.

To characterize wind turbine responses to disturbances on the electric grid, NREL developed the Controllable Grid Interface (CGI) evaluation system, the first in the United States to include fault simulation capabilities, which allows manufacturers and system operators to conduct the evaluations required for certification in a controlled laboratory environment. It is the only system in the world that is fully integrated with two dynamometers and has the capacity to extend that integration to turbines in the field and to a matrix of electronic and mechanical storage devices—all of which are within close proximity.

NREL also analyzes innovative wind turbine subsystems and configurations that show promise in our ability to deploy wind energy at levels that can lead a transformation of our energy system. The lab's researchers evaluate these novel approaches through numerical modeling and simulation in advance of hardware development, reducing the risk of pursuing potentially game-changing technology.

Capabilities include:

Aerodynamics, aeroelasticity, and structural dynamics
Computational fluid dynamics
Drivetrain innovation
Drivetrain modeling, analysis, and validation
High-performance computing
Prognostics and health management
Reliability, operations, and maintenance
Systems engineering and optimization.

Energy Systems Design

NREL focuses on critical areas that reflect the long-term needs of the industry, including developing innovative controls at the turbine and plant levels, advancing modeling and simulation capabilities to assess and optimize novel designs, and supporting standards development for co-use.

Capabilities include:

Analysis and design of innovative substructures and moorings
Advanced modeling capabilities, validation, and optimization
Aerodynamics, aeroelasticity, hydrodynamics, mooring systems, structural dynamics, and marine architecture
Computational fluid dynamics.

Engineering Modeling and Validation

NREL develops and maintains open-source modeling tools for wind turbine designers, manufacturers, consultants, certifiers, researchers, and educators. Our suite of models and high-performance computing codes are capable of simulating the behavior of wind power technologies in complex environments—such as storms, earthquakes, and turbulence—and modeling the effects of turbulent inflow, unsteady aerodynamic forces, structural dynamics, drivetrain response, control systems, and hydrodynamic loading. We specialize in developing preprocessors to help build the models, postprocessors to analyze the results, and utilities to run and manage the processing tasks. NREL enables the development of advanced wind plant technologies by leveraging knowledge and data to improve physics-based engineering design competence and tools. We work collaboratively with the wind energy community to develop, validate, and apply engineering tools at the wind turbine, support structure, and plant levels.

Capabilities include:

Physics-based engineering tools
High- and mid-fidelity predictive simulations of complex flow physics and turbine dynamics
Modeling turbines and plants together, multidisciplinary analyses, and overall cost of energy
Loads analysis
Identification of design-driving conditions.

Plant-Level Controls

NREL is researching new control methodologies, such as wake steering and consensus control, for both land-based and offshore wind plants. Advanced wind turbine controls can enable annual energy production and reduce losses by more than 20%.

Capabilities include:

Wake control design and analysis
Wind plant optimization
Turbine modeling and simulation
High-performance computing
Data analytics and machine learning.

Projects

This multi-institutional project is developing new wind turbines with large rotors but light weights that can maintain or increase energy generation, building computational tools to facilitate such designs, and collecting data from experiments to validate those tools and designs.

The Big Adaptive Rotor (BAR) project, which ran from 2018 to 2024, represented 6 years of research and development efforts into new technologies supporting future land-based wind energy. Conducted in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories, BAR included wide concept screening followed by detailed investigations into highly flexible blades, controlled bending of components during rail transport, distributed aerodynamic control devices, downwind rotors, novel materials for manufacturing, and advanced numerical modeling tools. BAR researchers also worked within the Rotor Aerodynamic, Aeroelastic, and Wake experiment and investigated several challenges associated with highly flexible rotors. When BAR concluded, the STability and Aeroelastic Behavior of Large wind turbinEs project started.

The Competitiveness Improvement Project awards cost-shared subcontracts and technical support to industry manufacturers of small and medium-sized wind turbines to reduce technology costs, encourage product innovation, optimize turbines to improve return on investment, and certify commercial options on the market for performance and quality. Since 2012, the Competitiveness Improvement Project has awarded more than $18.5 million to more than 30 companies across the nation.

The now-concluded Defense and Disaster Deployable Turbine project—a collaboration among NREL, Sandia National Laboratories, and Idaho National Laboratory—aimed to meet the unique energy needs of defense operations and responses to humanitarian crises by creating a prototype portable, mobile wind turbine for temporary site energy generation without requiring fuel delivery.

NREL leads the Drivetrain Reliability Collaborative project and partners with wind turbine, drivetrain, and component manufacturers; plant owners and operators; independent service and analytics suppliers; and other researchers, universities, and consultants. The project combines system dynamic analysis, modeling, field failure statistics, dynamometer and field characterization, and operations and maintenance research (e.g., fault diagnostics and prognostics using physics-informed machine learning) in a multipronged approach to increase drivetrain reliability and turbine availability and reduce operations and maintenance costs and the cost of wind energy.

NREL is developing a tool set to help developers design and optimize large-scale floating offshore wind farm designs. Researchers are also generating reference designs for the specific site conditions of several U.S. regions.

Through international collaborations facilitated by the International Energy Agency Wind Technology Collaboration Programme, researchers are focusing on resource characterization, plant and turbine optimization, techno-economic and market analysis, environmental impact evaluation, energy systems integration, and advanced design tool development.

The now-complete Microgrids, Infrastructure Resilience, and Advanced Controls Launchpad project, a multilab collaboration, worked to improve controls, communication, and hardware for the integration of wind energy technologies in distributed microgrids, providing power where it is needed.

The growth in wind turbine size has reduced stability margins and challenged the accuracy of numerical design tools, making aeroelastic instabilities a critical issue—especially for slender, flexible land-based turbines. These instabilities can arise in operation, parked, or idling states. The STability and Aeroelastic Behavior of Large wind turbinEs project, led by NREL with national lab and industry partners, focuses on operational instabilities caused by negative aeroelastic damping. Its goals are to improve prediction methods and explore ways to enhance structural damping through three work packages: advancing numerical models, characterizing damping in the lab, and validating models at full scale.