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- Category: Articles
Bright Strategic and Economic Perspectives for Onshore Wind in Medium to Low Wind Speed Areas
Commercial availability of the new IEC3A wind turbine models, which have been specifically designed for high productivity in low and light wind conditions, opens new opportunities for onshore wind power development worldwide. An open question is whether the price of electricity delivered from wind farms using this type of wind turbine will be competitive with the cost of kilowatt-hours (kWh) from conventional power plants and/or from electricity markets. The analysis proposed in this article by Bernard Chabot shows that there are good prospects for cost competitiveness; meaning that power produced in these low and light wind conditions will soon be one of the most competitive energy technologies able to deliver clean electricity in the vast majority of countries.By Bernard Chabot, Consultant & Trainer on Renewable Energy, BCCONSULT, France
- Category: Articles
Not so Harmonious?
This article describes an aspect of wind turbine operation related to control instability which may result in excessive harmonic currents injection from wind turbines, well above the typical level. This phenomenon and has been reported for a number of wind plants. The excessive harmonic currents were the result of the interactions between harmonic currents on the power systems and turbine controls under particular operating conditions. These conditions can be summarised as follows: (1) the presence of background harmonics and resonance conditions in the power system and (2) undampened turbine control response at frequencies coinciding with one or more of the harmonic currents in the power system. Both these conditions will be explained in this article, and the resulting control interaction will be clarified. Harmonic interaction is a known problem among power electronics engineers and control designers, and mitigating solutions are available.By Grazia Todeschini, EnerNex, USA
- Category: Articles
Engineering the Next-Generation Technology Together
According to Pertti Kurttila from The Switch, today’s businesses need to constantly build on uncertainty. They need to be ready and responsive to continual market changes. The customer and supplier need to create a tight-knit team, constantly taking small steps in the same direction in order to engineer tomorrow’s wind technology. In this article, Mr Kurttila explains ‘agile positioning’ and how The Switch has used this concept to refine its business model.By Pertti Kurttila, Vice President, Supply Chain, The Switch
- Category: Articles
A Radically New Turbine that Works in Wind and Water
The industry gold standard is the three-bladed, horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT), but one has to wonder why. As explained below, HAWTs come with many inherent problems. EverLiftWind Technologies have been investigating an alternative based on a fixed-wing type airfoil, and in this article Peter Keller describes the company’s new concept, the Looped Airfoil Wind Turbine or LAWT.By Peter R. Keller, Vice President for Marketing & Co-founder, EverLiftWind Technologies, USA
- Category: Articles
The Dual Mode Solution to Wind Resource Assessment and Turbine Performance Optimisation
March 2013 saw the tenth anniversary of the first commercial lidar deployment for wind energy applications – and while it is now commonplace to see wind lidars (such as ZephIR 300 and those that followed) in wind energy resource assessments, it was actually a turbine-mounted application for which the ZephIR technology was first deployed. Ten years on, and ZephIR’s continuous-wave (CW) lidar technology continues to be developed and is now gaining increasing acceptance in its original application of optimising wind turbine generator performance. This acceptance is founded on a body of evidence from ground-based operation spanning some 650+ deployments, 3.5 million operating hours and recent comprehensive comparative trials of 79 ZephIR 300s against an IEC-compliant met mast as part of an industry accepted validation process with banks’ engineers such as Natural Power and GL Garrad Hassan.By Alex Woodward, Head of Marketing, and Michael Harris, Chief Scientist, ZephIR Ltd, UK
- Category: Articles
How Wind Measurement Can Affect the Planning of a Wind Farm
Although the costs of a wind measurement campaign are quite small when compared to the overall investment needed to construct a wind farm, many developers still try to save some thousands of euros by using smaller met masts and cheap sensors. But does this strategy pay off? Or, in other words, what is gained by a high quality wind measurement? To answer these questions this article compares two scenarios. Scenario 1 has an IEC standard tower, first class sensors and measurement at hub height. Scenario 2 assumes inappropriate (cheap) sensors, bad design and measurement somewhat below hub height. All other conditions (turbine type, location, terrain, obstacles, etc.) are assumed to be exactly the same, in order to estimate the effect of the different measurement regimes. The energy yield is calculated by adding the respective uncertainties a consultant would estimate for the respective measurements, so that the two scenarios can be compared in financial terms and then be related to the cost of high quality measurement.By Cornelia Haaß-Ropeter and Johannes Lange Ge:Net, and Martin Kolbe, Anemos GmbH, Germany
- Category: Articles
The Kilowatt-Hour as a New Monetary Unit?
Despite impressive gains in the amount of wind power production during the last four years and the benefits this has brought, the financial statements of wind turbine manufacturers and related businesses have shown large losses over the same period and it is difficult for smaller investors to get a good return on investments in renewable energy. Maybe we need a radical rethink. In this article, Mike J. Fritz presents his arguments for the kilowatt-hour as a new monetary unit and standard. He also provides the text of the Renewable Power to the People Amendment, which he suggests, if supported and successful in the USA, could set the stage for other countries to follow.By Mike J. Fritz, USA
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| #18 Nordex wind turbines installed at the Petkus wind farm in Germany (courtesy Tomasz Mokosinski) |
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