Abstract
Multiple Alberta wind facility operators have considered possible deployment of Turbine Integrated Mortality Reduction (TIMRSM) technology at their facilities. TIMR monitors for bat echolocation calls and curtails turbines when bats are detected. It has been unclear how this detection-based approach to smart curtailment for bats would influence wind energy production, and how this approach might compare to other possible curtailment strategies such as blanket wind speed-based curtailment. We combined available Alberta wind regime data with simulated bat activity data to analyze the possible influences of various curtailment strategies on wind energy production at existing wind energy facilities in Alberta. We modeled wind variables (e.g., night-time wind speed), curtailment thresholds (e.g., 5.0, 6.0, 7.0 meters/second), and bat activity patterns (low, average, and high; uniformly and randomly distributed) to determine annual energy production (AEP) under different scenarios for six curtailment analysis areas in Alberta. Both approaches to curtailment yielded relatively low AEP loss, with detection-based curtailment scenarios losing less than 1% AEP and producing approximately 50 to 100% more energy than blanket curtailment scenarios. Scenarios of low bat activity often resulted in close to 100% of total available energy. These results demonstrated how acoustically guided smart curtailment—combining acoustic and wind speed information in near real-time—can be a useful tool for reducing the impacts of wind energy facilities on individual bats and bat populations while minimizing unnecessary production losses.