The key to optimizing wind energy is the ability to predict and understand the complex interplay of turbulent atmospheric fluid dynamics, turbine wakes and turbine dynamics. This complexity increases as turbines become larger, wind farms increase in number and are built on complex terrain, both on land and at sea. Predictive simulation of wind energy requires solving an extreme range of scales, ranging from submillimeter-scale leaf boundary layers to kilometer-scale wind energy domains.

Chief Scientist Michael Sprague hosted this webinar in which a panel of leaders in wind energy science and technology discussed the creation and application of a new open-source wind energy modeling and simulation environment called ExaWind. The ExaWind project is a close collaboration between more than 40 researchers from NREL, Sandia National Laboratories, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, The University of Texas at Austin and Parallel Geometric Algorithms LLC. Our team is compiling and creating a set of computational fluid dynamics and computational structural dynamics codes for wind turbines and wind power plants. ExaWind is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project (https://www.exascaleproject.org/).

Please take the opportunity to connect and share this video with your friends and family if you find it helpful.