AWS Truepower is a renewable energy consulting company that provides feasibility, assessment and operations intelligence to the wind and solar industries. Beyond initial resource modeling and siting, AWS Truepower has a wide variety of services that support the renewable energy project development lifecycle. These include resource mapping, energy assessment, project engineering, due diligence, performance evaluation, and power production forecasting.
The company’s software product solutions include eWind®, openWind®, windNavigator®. AWS Truepower supports customers including developers, investors, utilities, and governmental and institutional clients. AWS Truepower has created wind maps for over 60 countries, and has been serving the renewable energy community for over 25 years. The company is located in Albany, NY.

History

AWS Truepower was started in 1981 under the name Associated Weather Services. Initially, the company, composed of research meteorologists from New York State University at Albany, provided atmospheric field measurements, air quality studies, forensic meteorology for law suits and insurance claims, and solar and wind energy feasibility studies. The company became a subsidiary of W.S. Flemming & Associates, an energy consulting firm, in 1983 which resulted in its incorporation under the name Associated Weather Services, Inc.

AWS gained its first substantial clients in the years to follow with their consulting efforts chiefly surrounding Niagara Mohawk, presently known as National Grid. Due to the large scale of business from Niagara Mohawk and the US Environmental Protection Agency, founders of the company, Bruce Bailey and Ron Stewart, became 50-50 partners after W.S. Flemming & Associates chose to sell AWS in 1985. Bailey purchased Stewart’s stake in the company in 1990 resulting in complete ownership. The same year, AWS underwent a name change to AWS Scientific to communicate that the company satisfied not only weather and technology needs, but also engineering services related to solar, wind energy project development, and air quality research.

In 1997, AWS Scientific, Brower & Company, and MESO Inc. joined forces to form a new, equal ownership company: Truewind Solutions. This move pushed AWS Scientific into the wind power industry and initiated the development of the advanced wind mapping and forecasting applications the company offers today. In 2004, the two companies AWS Scientific and Truewind Solutions consolidated to form AWS Truewind LLC. In 2007, AWS Truewind entered into a joint venture called “Meteosim Truewind, S.L.” with Barcelona Spain based Meteosim, S.L.

In April 2010, AWS Truewind, LLC, announced the official relaunch of the company as AWS Truepower, reflecting an expanded strategic focus on delivering a broader set of renewable energy development and operational solutions to its global customer base.

eWind

AWS Truepower’s eWind® forecasting service provides a customizable solution to wind industry challenges by delivering forecasts of wind speed and plant output with look-ahead periods ranging from minutes to days. eWind can greatly reduce imbalance charges, minimize incremental reserve costs, facilitate plant dispatch scheduling, inform spot-market trading, increase capacity payments, and optimize plant maintenance.

openWind

openWind®, created by AWS Truepower, is an open-source wind farm design software

Wind energy software

Specialized wind energy software applications aid in the development and operation of wind farms.- Program management :Programs involve equipment vendors and service providers that collaborate throughout the project. Documentation, lease management, asset tracking and warranty management are some...

. The program is unique in that it is built around standard GIS data types and employs a GIS- style interface to allow seamless integration of geographic and modeling data. openWind is comparable to WindFarmer and WindPRO in its ability to calculate turbine wake impacts and energy yield based on site conditions and the available resource. The software uses modeled wind-flow data known as Wind Resource Grids and data from meteorological towers to calculate wind farm energy production. openWind has a slightly different version of the Eddy Viscosity wake model featured in WindFarmer. It also has the Modified Park model which is employed by WindPRO. openWind is designed to be used by scientists, wind analysts, and engineers to design wind farms. The software is free to the public for download and use. openWind was released in October 2008 at the Canadian Wind Energy Associations Annual Conference and Trade Show.

windNavigator

windNavigator® is a web based prospecting and project siting application that allows users to purchase wind resource data including wind speed, distribution, wind rose, and monthly and diurnal data for wind farm siting and analysis. windNavigator is based on the interactive GoogleMaps and enables users to search for prospective land areas for a wind farm and purchase high resolution GIS data via the internet for thorough planning. The high-resolution data has a standard error of margin of 0.35 m/s at 80 meters.

AWS Truepower released windNavigator in June 2008 to the general public. In June 2010, AWS Truepower released the application’s updated version, windNavigator 2.2, which supports project design and automated business processes, with fast, convenient access to high-quality wind project design data.