Erin MacDonald

Assistant Professor

Office: 2020 Black Engineering Phone: 515 294-3298 Email: erinmacd@iastate.edu

Department(s): Mechanical Engineering.

Research Interests: Incorporation of landowner perspective in wind farm layout planning and costing.

Current Research: Landowners, via their cooperation and participation decisions, affect the project development timeline, selection of equipment, grid integration, and also the final layout of a wind farm. Thus, landowners can positively or negatively affect the Cost of Energy (COE) for a wind farm. Traditional layout optimization research implicitly assumes the willing participation of all landowners, which manifests as the assumption of an available, continuous piece of land as a parameter in the optimization. Dr. MacDonald’s work explicitly models landowners’ decisions to participate in wind projects and thus includes potential gaps in land availability. Recent and forthcoming publications optimize for best layouts/COE under different landowner participation constraint scenarios. We investigate landowner utility functions with preferences for noise and financial compensation, and include representations of uncertainty for important model parameters. The work has the potential to lower COE, increase the power output, and increase number of farms in the near-term without the need for improved equipment technology.

Recent Publications:

Chen, Le, and Erin MacDonald, 2013: Effects of uncertain land availability, wind shear, and cost on wind farm layout. Proceedings, ASME 2013 International Design Engineering Technical Conference & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, Portland, OR, American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Chen, Le, and Erin MacDonald, 2012: Considering landowner participation in wind farm layout optimization. Journal of Mechanical Design, 134(8), 084506. (doi:10.1115/1.4006999).

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