The Wind Diesel Application Center is in the final stages of developing a centralized Wind Hybrid Simulator.  The simulator will be housed at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power facility in Fairbanks and will be used for research, testing and validation, and training and education purposes.  The simulator is essentially a village-scale power generation system.  The research agenda for the simulator will focus on optimizing existing wind-diesel systems, developing high penetration systems to significantly reduce diesel consumption, examining energy storage technologies for power stability,  load leveling, and creating residential heat using excess wind power. 

WiDAC will utilize existing community installations to enhance the research being done with the simulator, including the "Smart Grid" in Kwigillingok and Kongiganak, the pumped hydro system in Kodiak, and the flow battery installation in Kotzebue.

The simulator will build on the experience gained from an existing diesel engine test bed at ACEP that has been used extensively over the past decade for new research on fuels, waste heat recovery, emissions, and efficiency.  The equipment needed for the Wind Hybrid Simulator includes two 200kW diesel gen-sets with electronic controls, electronic load bank, a Northwind 100 wind turbine, a generic wind turbine simulator, a grid similator, battery bank, secondary load control, appropriate switchgear, synchronous condenser, inverter and DC bus, instrumentation, and data acquisition equipment.

Development of the Wind Diesel Hybrid Simulator would not have been possible without the support and sponsorship from the following entities:

* Denali Commission

* Sustainable Automation

* Alaska Center for Energy & Power

* Marsh Creek LLC