Research to support onshore and offshore wind development and expansion and address environmental issues
Project location: CanmetENERGY Ottawa, Ottawa, ON.
Timeline: 5 years (2023 to 2028)
Program: Funded by the Program of Energy R&D and NRCan’s Offshore Wind program
The project seeks to address challenges related to the deployment and operation of onshore and offshore wind energy with respect to technical, environmental, and social integration. This includes co-ordination of domestic and international R&D activities. The goals of this project are to provide utilities, industry, researchers, and policymakers with techno-economic assessment, data products, and tools to support increased cost-effective deployment of onshore and offshore wind, while minimizing adverse environmental impacts.
CanmetENERGY-Ottawa (CE-O) currently focuses on four aspects of wind energy: offshore wind, grid integration, environmental impact mitigation, and domestic and international collaboration on wind energy R&D.
Offshore wind
Project Overview and Objectives
Offshore wind is an ample but largely untapped renewable energy source. This resource shares space with key industries such as fisheries, shipping lanes, passenger transport, and sensitive land use considerations such as marine protected areas, Indigenous land agreements, and migratory seabird lanes. These factors must be appropriately considered and accounted for to determine suitable areas for the development of offshore wind.
This project seeks to identify and classify all relevant meteorological/oceanographic (‘metocean’) data needed to enable offshore wind development in Atlantic Canada, including specifying the appropriate measures to collect this data. CE-O is providing technical support for field measurement campaigns in Atlantic Canada, and the early-stage analysis of offshore wind potential in other regions of Canada such as the West coast.
Impact and Innovations
CE-O is working to further the offshore wind knowledge base through the generation of original analysis and by supporting new data collection efforts:
- Metocean Assessment for Offshore Wind in Atlantic Canada (2024)
- Preliminary Considerations Analysis of Offshore Wind Energy in Atlantic Canada (2023) and accompanying GIS Map Layers (2023).
Grid integration
Project Overview and Objectives
As renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and hydro become more prevalent, the challenge of integrating these intermittent resources into the existing power grid grows. CE-O works to assess the role that wind energy can play in Canada’s energy future. This includes the provision of grid reliability and ancillary services, which have become increasingly crucial as the energy supply continues to rapidly diversify. The historically unidirectional power grid was built to acquire power from a single source, like a hydro dam or a natural gas power plant and supply it to users on the grid. As additional, variable renewable energy (VRE) technologies such as wind turbines are added along the power grid, the grid’s operation is altered in a way for which it was not originally designed.
Impact and Innovations
CE-O provides technical support for grid integration and transmission studies that seek to identify necessary infrastructure upgrades and potential constraints required to accommodate significant quantities of wind-generated electricity.
Environmental impact mitigation
Project Overview and Objectives
Migratory bat mortality is one of the most significant challenges facing wind farm operators in Ontario and Alberta from a regulatory, economic, and environmental perspective. Mitigation efforts include appropriate wind farm siting, farm operational changes such as timed curtailment, and acoustic deterrents to ward off bats entirely.
Wind turbines have an average service life of 20-25 years. As wind turbines reach the end of their lives, they present a unique problem of ‘stranded’ assets. Circularity in the wind energy industry is therefore key, though challenging. Industrial processes required to produce steel and cement for turbine towers use large amounts of energy and virgin materials. Wind turbine blades are made of glass or carbon fibre composites, which are difficult to recycle due to high energy processing requirements and the distances necessary to transport the recyclate to a recycling centre.
Impact and Innovations
CE-O is working to address bat mortality concerns through desktop analysis and by providing support for field demonstrations to assess the effectiveness of mitigation strategies and technologies. CE-O is also pursuing collaborations to investigate new, innovative solutions to the problems posed by wind turbine components reaching end of life.
- Review of Bat Fatality Mitigation Studies and Recommendations for Canada (2024) CE-O maintains the Canadian Wind Turbine Database, a publicly accessible record of all active wind farms in Canada.
- Canadian Wind Turbine Database (Revised 2024)
Domestic and international collaboration on wind energy R&D
Project Overview and Objectives
In the interest of bolstering the uptake and impact of wind energy research domestically and abroad, CE-O strives to share its research and findings with relevant industry partners. The Canadian Wind Research Network, co-founded by CE-O, serves as a national forum for technical wind energy R&D focused on the needs of Canadian stakeholders.
CE-O serves on the Executive Committee of the IEA Wind Technology Collaboration Programme (IEA Wind TCP) and coordinates Canadian participation in various wind research tasks. Canada currently participates in Task 11 (Topical Expert Meetings), Task 25 (Grid Integration), Task 28 (Social Acceptance), Task 34 (Environmental Effects), Task 41 (Distributed Wind), Task 43 (Digitalization), Task 46 (Blade Erosion), Task 50 (Hybrid Power Plants), Task 52 (Wind Lidar) and Task 54 (Cold Climate Wind Power), and Task 57 (Joint Assessment of Models).
Impact and Innovations
CE-O serves on the Executive Committee of the IEA Wind Technology Collaboration Programme, and co-ordinates participation of Canadian researchers in various IEA Wind tasks. CE-O has also supported the establishment and operation of the Canadian Wind Energy Research Network, led by the Wind Energy Institute of Canada.
Contact CanmetENERGY in Ottawa
To learn more about this project, email our Business Office.