As wind sites are developed closer to populated areas, there has been increasing dialogue and engagement with affected communities regarding the risk of ice throw to surrounding structures. Ice throw has recently been a major driving concern in numerous wind ordinance revision processes throughout the US. At the same time, there are no international recommendations or standards that govern how ice throw risk should be assessed or modeled. Likewise, there are no common guidelines available that specify recommended acceptable levels of risk. This lack of standards and best practices has led to uncertainty in the siting process that adds to cost and risk during project development.
This poster will provide an overview of recent community concerns about ice throw and how they have affected drafting and revision of wind ordinances. Several recent wind ordinance drafting and revision processes in which ice throw risk was a driving concern will be discussed. The physics behind ice throw will be reviewed, to include the effects of the local climate and turbine size and operating parameters. A brief survey will be provided describing available physics-based models for ice throw and measured data sets available in the public domain. The final portion of this session will describe recent IEA efforts to draft international guidelines on ice throw assessment methodology that can be used in siting studies for new wind installations where ice throw is a community concern