Whiffle, a leading provider in high resolution weather forecasting, agreed with Shell on a two-year joint development agreement and to deliver Shell licenses of Whiffle’s innovative weather model called GRASP (GPU-resident Atmospheric Simulation Platform). By taking on GRASP as a new modeling tool, Shell aims to improve their modeling capabilities for commercial wind and solar energy projects.
Erik van Iperen, General Manager Renewable Power Generation Technology at Shell: “As we are powering progress through providing more and cleaner energy solutions, we are becoming more dependent on renewable energy sources. This requires a thorough understanding of detailed weather resource impact on our asset’s performance. By deploying GRASP and collaborating in its continuous development, our wind and solar portfolio will benefit from improved wind resource estimates, lower uncertainty in the annual energy yield prediction and an improved layout optimization. This will help to put Shell on the forefront of wind and solar resource modeling.”
Whiffle’s unique technology involves running a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) model on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), allowing the user to perform ultra high-resolution meteorological studies at unmatched computational speed. In the context of wind energy GRASP has proven to be particularly valuable for complex sites where the wind flow is difficult to predict, such as large wind farms that cope with significant blockage and wake effects or other locations where high turbulence is to be expected. GRASP’s value for solar energy is also apparent, as it explicitly models cloud formations, radiation and temperature profiles.
Remco Verzijlbergh, Director of Operations at Whiffle: “We are very happy to collaborate with Shell in the coming years. Simulating the complex situation in clusters of wind farms in varying meteorological circumstances is a perfect application of our GRASP LES model. Wake losses and global blockage effects are very relevant research subjects and critical to the farm planning and operations of wind farms. Additionally, we look forward to cooperating with Shell in the field of solar energy modeling too, as we are convinced that GRASP will also make a difference here.”