https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digital-apollo - The book Digital Apollo [0] is fascinating on this subject. It describes the tensions that had to be resolved in terms who had overall authority, e.g. mission control vs. the crew vs. automation. book
Project Idea Simulate groups of wind turbines with some turning clockwise and some ccw to see if there are any efficiency gains to be had
“Industrial standards Which way a wind turbine turns might not seem to matter”
It’s cool work. Some things I’ve picked out from a quick skim:
Only the downstream turbines gets a boost, cutting gains of a pair in half*
The boost only occurs at night, cutting gains approximately in half again.
Veering winds only occur 75% of the time
This already cuts the gains from an ideal 23% to roughly 4.5% real world.
I don’t see any treatment of incoming wind direction - it appears to only consider pure West to East wind with turbines precisely aligned with the wind. I suspect the effect would disappear as the wind shifted from other directions. While wind is generally westerly in the US, it varies a lot hour-to-hour.
Combine this with the above and I’d suspect real-world benefit is in the 1-2% range, at which point the added complexity of maintenance and production probably cancels out the benefit.
Not a knock on the research, because it is great work, but it is incomplete.
*This may be unfair, as it’s unclear what affect multiple in a row would have. But the power production of multiple turbines in a row when the wind is blowing precisely parallel to the row drops off pretty quickly. Commercial turbines are something like 45% efficient these days, so turbine 3 only has ~30% of the original power available.
Josh Dyson might have some insight. He did work on OpenFoam