• Editorial: Will Wind Energy Deliver?

    by in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Energy, Wind
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    Wind turbines are seen at Thanet Offshore Wind Farm off the Kent coast in southern England September 23, 2010. Thanet farm is the world's largest operational offshore wind farm. REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth (BRITAIN - Tags: ENERGY ENVIRONMENT) - RTXSKIH

    via Boston Herald: Last week, Massachusetts announced the winner of a new offshore wind contract — which means the Bay State is about to get its first offshore wind farm. The Vineyard Wind project will be located at least a dozen miles south of Martha’s Vineyard and is expected to generate 800 megawatts of energy — enough to power 400,000 homes. Vineyard Wind is aiming for 2021 to be up and operational. There is a lot to like about wind. The rows of wind turbines standing 397 feet tall (that’s 92 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty), rising out of the water are visually striking with their sleek blades turning in concert. Wind energy is completely green energy, powered by a vast and inexhaustible resource. It does not pollute the water or the air. There is no ugly byproduct to contend with nor does the apparatus itself take up a lot of space. According to its website, “Vineyard Wind will offer $3.7 billion in energy related cost savings over the life of the project while eliminating 1.68 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions — the equivalent of taking 325,000 cars off the road.” It sounds very promising as do a lot of the carefully worded­ highlights on the Vineyard Wind’s “Benefits” page. “Vineyard Wind’s turbines, totaling up to 800 MW, are expected to reliably produce the amount of energy used by over 450,000 Massachusetts homes. Offshore wind delivers much of its power in the winter, when Massachusetts needs the… Read more

  • World’s Largest Wind Turbines (9.5 Megawatts) Headed To Northwester 2 Offshore Wind Farm

    by in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Energy, Wind
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    via Clean Technica: MHI Vestas announced this week that it will provide its 9.5 megawatt (MW) wind turbines to the 224 MW Northwester 2 offshore wind farm set to be developed in Belgian waters, making it the first time the record-setting 9.5 MW wind turbine will be installed and operational anywhere in the world. Formed in 2014 by Vestas Wind Systems A/S and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, MHI Vestas is the world’s largest offshore wind-focused wind turbine manufacturer, and in June of last year it unveiled to the world its V164-9.5 MW wind turbine, the most powerful wind turbine currently available in the world. Measuring in with 80-meter long blades that have a swept area of 21,124 meters-squared, the turbine is bigger than the London Eye and a single turbine alone can power 8,300 average households. Of course, since June the offshore wind turbine arms race has continued apace, with both MHI Vestas and GE Renewable Energy making significant strides. Earlier this month MHI Vestas installed an 8.8 MW wind turbine at Vattenfall’s European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre off the coast of North East Scotland, which is currently the world’s largest wind turbine in operation. However, in early March GE Renewable Energy unveiled its mammoth 12 MW Haliade-X offshore wind turbine, and just this week confirmed it would be heading to the UK’s Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult for advanced testing. Until the Haliade-X enters operation, however, and assuming no competitors have an ace up their sleeves, MHI Vestas will hold on to… Read more

  • World’s Most Powerful Wind Turbine: One Rotation ‘Can Power the Average UK Home for a Day’

    by in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Energy, Wind
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    via gtm: Swedish energy giant Vattenfall announced Tuesday that it successfully installed an 8.8-megawatt capacity offshore wind turbine from Vestas at the European Offshore Wind Deployment Center (EOWDC) off the coast of Scotland. It’s the first of 11 turbines planned for the project and the first deployment of a model of that size for commercial use. Vattenfall will also install another 8.8-megawatt model from Vestas at the site. It’s an important milestone for a project that faced years of legal challenges from Donald Trump. Before becoming president, Trump battled the project because it conflicted with a planned golf course development in the area. At the time, his organization said it “will completely destroy the bucolic Aberdeen Bay.” The U.K.’s Supreme Court struck down Trump’s challenge in 2015. Now, Vattenfall will use the site to test the high-capacity turbines. For the two 8.8-megawatt turbines, enhanced internal power modes bumped capacity up from 8.4 megawatts on MHI Vestas’ flagship V164 turbine platform. Søren Lassen, a business analyst at MAKE Consulting, said the uprating trend is noteworthy, but the 0.4 megawatt increase is not revolutionary. He noted that MHI Vestas already has orders for a 9.5-megawatt version of its V164 platform turbine launched in June. “The trend of uprating is symptomatic of the offshore wind market in Europe, as developers push to take advantage of the favorable wind resources,” said Lassen. “Turbine [manufacturers] will continue to boost the rating of their current offshore platforms into the early 2020s.” Turbines, offshore and onshore, will just… Read more

  • The First Floating Wind Farm Is Ridiculously Efficient

    by in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Energy, Wind
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    via Popular Mechanics: Wind turbines are showing up on top of mountains, across vast plains, and in the waters off the coasts of the world’s cities. Even the open ocean isn’t closed to wind turbines, and in even better news, the project off the coast of Scotland is dramatically surpassing expectations. The Hywind wind farm is the world’s first floating wind farm, located about 15 miles off the coast of Scotland. Unlike other offshore wind farms, Hywind isn’t anchored to the seafloor. Instead, Hywind relies on buoys and anchors to stay afloat even in high winds or waves. This makes floating wind farms like Hywind a great choice for regions where traditional offshore wind farms aren’t viable. “The west coast of the USA, Japan and Hawaii are all places that need a lot of energy and that are consistently windy, but where the sea is very deep,” says Hywind engineer Halvor Hoen Hersleth. “Floating wind power is ideal for these areas.” But for floating wind farms to be successful, they have to be more than just versatile. They also have to be profitable, which means generating enough energy to justify the large construction costs. Fortunately, the Hywind farm seems to have succeeded in this area as well, reaching a 65 percent capacity factor over the past three months. A generator’s capacity factor is the ratio between the amount of electricity it generates and the maximum amount of energy it could possibly produce. Most baseline plants, like nuclear or natural gas plants… Read more

  • New Recyclable Resin Makes Wind Turbines Much More Sustainable

    by in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Materials & Manufacturing Engineering, Recycle material, Wind
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    wind_turbine

    via Vanderbilt University:  Fields of spinning wind turbines inspire thoughts of earth-friendly energy, but until now, generating wind power hasn’t been as sustainable as people may have thought. It generally requires a great deal of time and energy to cure the type of resin that makes the 150-foot-wide fiberglass turbines strong and durable. When they finally wear out after 20 or 25 years, very little of the material can be recycled. Doug Adams, Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Daniel F. Flowers Professor, said that made wind turbines an ideal project for the Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation, a consortium of industry, government and academic institutions aimed at improving the composite materials that are manufactured for use in turbines, cars, compressed gas storage tanks and a number of other products like airplanes and sporting goods. “What better application to look at than wind power, where we think about energy and sustainability foremost in our minds? It’s a grand challenge in composites manufacturing,” said Adams, who also chairs Vanderbilt’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The problem has a solution in sight, thanks to a new recyclable resin that cures at room temperature provided by industry partner Arkema. This new resin, called Elium, creates its own heat and cures without creating flaws in the fiberglass. Unlike its predecessor, this resin doesn’t prevent the fiberglass from being recycled. The nation’s increasing demand for electricity has driven significant growth in the wind energy sector. The American Wind Energy Association… Read more

  • Artificial Island Hub Will Collect Wind Energy and Divert it to Shore

    by in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Energy, Wind
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    wind_energy

    via Futurism : AN ENERGY ISLAND The winds of change are blowing towards renewable energy, and nations are becoming increasingly more creative in how they can capitalize on the growing trend. At present, the most popular sources of renewable energy come from either solar or wind. Both, however, require tracts of land for their infrastructure. With real estate for wind farms becoming increasingly expensive and scarce, Dutch power grid and energy network operator TenneT wants to build wind turbines on the sea. Well, not on water per se: rather, on shallow areas in a region in the North Sea called the Dogger Bank. Located some 125 km (78 miles) off the East Yorkshire coast, Dogger Bank is supposedly a windy enough site, allowing the company to optimize wind energy generation. The Dogger Bank project is effectively what’s called an offshore wind farm, but what makes this project radical is the artificial island built in the middle. This would serve as a hub for the vast offshore farm, expected to be even bigger in scale than the current largest windfarm in Gansu, China. TenneT expects the Dogger Bank project to be able to handle a capacity of 30GW. What’s more, TenneT’s proposed project might give wind energy a necessary push towards continuing to lower the price of wind energy. “It’s crucial for industry to continue with the cost reduction path,” Rob van der Hage, TenneT’s offshore wind grid development program manager, told The Guardian. “The big challenge we are facing towards 2030… Read more

  • The World’s First Floating Wind Farm Is an Incredible Feat of Engineering

    by in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Energy, Wind
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    wind_energy

    via Singularity Hub : Wind turbines are a valuable source of renewable energy, but it can be hard to find a good place to put them. They need to be close to a populated area so that transporting the power they generate isn’t too expensive—but they suffer from some serious “not in my backyard” syndrome when it comes to being too close to populated areas; they’re noisy and, though a field of them looks scenic from far away, up close they’re sort of huge and ugly. So why not put them out in the ocean? It’s not a new idea—as of the end of 2016 there were 14,384 MW of installed offshore wind power capacity, the bulk of it in Europe—but what is new is having the turbines float instead of being anchored to the sea floor. Last week saw the launch of the world’s first floating offshore wind farm. Located in the North Sea off the coast of Peterhead, Scotland, the wind farm consists of five enormous horizontal-axis turbines that together can generate 30 megawatts of electricity. That’s enough to power about 20,000 homes. The wind farm is called Hywind, and it’s been in the making for over 15 years, spearheaded by Norwegian energy firm Statoil. Key facts about the turbines and their location include: The turbines are positioned in water up to 129 meters (423 feet) deep (anchored turbines are usually placed at maximum depths of 50m (164 feet)). Each turbine is 253 meters tall in total (around 830… Read more

  • There’s Enough Wind Energy Over the Oceans to Power Human Civilization, Scientists Say

    by in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Energy, Wind
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    wind_energy

    via The Washington Post : New research published on Monday finds there is so much wind energy potential over oceans that it could theoretically be used to generate “civilization scale power” — assuming, that is, that we are willing to cover enormous stretches of the sea with turbines, and can come up with ways to install and maintain them in often extreme ocean environments. It’s very unlikely that we would ever build out open ocean turbines on anything like that scale — indeed, doing so could even alter the planet’s climate, the research finds. But the more modest message is that wind energy over the open oceans has large potential — reinforcing the idea that floating wind farms, over very deep waters, could be the next major step for wind energy technology. “I would look at this as kind of a greenlight for that industry from a geophysical point of view,” said Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif. The study, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was led by Carnegie researcher Anna Possner, who worked in collaboration with Caldeira. The study takes, as its outset, prior research that has found that there’s probably an upper limit to the amount of energy that can be generated by a wind farm that’s located on land. The limit arises both because natural and human structures on land create friction that slows down the wind speed, but also because each individual wind turbine extracts some of the… Read more

  • Wind Energy in California: The Good News and Bad News

    by in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Energy, Wind
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    wind_energy

    via San Diego Union-Tribune : Which way is the wind blowing in California? In some respects, wind energy in the state has never been better but by other measurements growth has flat-lined for the past four years. Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released its annual report analyzing technologies and markets for the wind industry that showed California has installed 5,656 megawatts of utility-scale wind, fourth-highest in the nation. California also ranks fifth in capacity for smaller, distributed wind energy systems since 2003, with 66 megawatts. According to the most recent numbers compiled by the California Energy Commission, wind accounts for 36 percent of generation from renewable facilities — the most in the state, edging out solar. One would think those figures would have the state’s leading wind industry group practically giddy. But instead, Nancy Rader, the executive director at the California Wind Energy Association, was practically glum when asked about the future of wind energy in the Golden State. “It’s pretty bleak in terms of the potential for new development,” she said in a telephone interview from her group’s headquarters in Berkeley. “We’re actually at risk of going backward in total capacity in California.” When wind energy was in its infancy some 30 years ago, California was the sector’s undisputed leader. Thanks in large part to some $1 billion in federal and state taxes, wind farms in California represented more than 90 percent of the globe’s total wind power capacity in the mid-1980s. But Texas has taken… Read more