Wind Turbine Power Projects Design And The Challenge For Green Wind Power

Commercial wind turbines are being manufactured and installed world-wide by the main industrialized countries as a part of an international drive to both reduce atmospheric pollution, which causes climate change, and due to consideration of the depletion of oil and gas stocks and their increasing cost.

In 2008 worldwide there was approximately 94,000 MW of wind energy capacity. Of this, 60% is located in Europe, 18% in USA, and with the remainder of 22% in the rest of the world.

The largest national capacity is in Germany at present, but the Germans are likely to be overtaken by new capacity due to come online in the United States during late 2008.

The current contribution to electricity (2008) of all sources of green wind power is approximately 5% now, and achieving the 2010 target looks unlikely under current conditions.

However, many governments worldwide are reacting to high oil and gas prices to reduce national dependency on oil & gas and we can expect that renewable energy sources or “alternative” sources, as they are often termed in the US, to be strongly encouraged by most governments which do not hold their own large natural reserves of oil and gas.

The present EU policy is to require member states to contribute to 20% of all European Union (EU) energy by 2020. Within this a UK contribution of 15% of all energy by 2020 would require approximately 35-40% of electricity to come from renewable energy sources. With wind energy as the primary source envisaged to realize this commitment you can begin to imagine the huge scale of the wind energy market in the years to come.

Overall, approximately 2,500 MW of operational operational wind capacity exists at present in the UK, spread across 170 projects.

The largest wind farm today is Horns Rev, Denmark, 160MW (2002).

An example of a UK offshore project operational is the Burbo Bank Farm, off Merseyside with 25 No. turbines.

In the first round of sites the allocation resulted in 18 licenses issued for projects around the UK of up to 100MW each. Fifteen sites were awarded (7,169 MW) but none had started construction at mid 2008, due to constraints of MoD due to radar, financial variability in current markets, grid and distribution capacity provisions, etc. This is really not a large amount of capacity when one considers the number of turbines needed if the UK is going to meet the target for renewable that the EU ministers have set themselves

Just compare the above at less than 10,000MW against the capacity target which the UK Government announced in December 2007 and again in June 2008 adding up to a strategic assessed requirement for an offshore wind power resource of nearly 35 GW (35,000 MW) of offshore wind capacity to come close to fulfilling the EU’s 2020 target for renewable energy.

The UK is well blessed with high offshire winds, other major offshore players in Europe with windy shores include Denmark, which is well advanced in wind turbine installation.

Turbines used in wind turbine power projects will continue to get larger on average with sizes for recent installations on land typically having a 70 – 90m rotor diameter, with a generating capacity of up to 3 MW. Turbine sizes for the proposed offshore wind farms are likely to be 80 to 100m diameter (currently up to 126m) with a generating capacity of at least 3MW, possibly from 5 to 7.5 MW rating.

Just how important to the economics the windiness of a location is can be realised when we tell you that wind energy produced by a rotor blade involves a cube law whereby a 10% increase in wind speed yields a 30% increase in energy available from the turbine.

There is still some debate about the technology predominantly to be used. At one time vertical axis turbines looked like being evolved into very large versions. However, although a few small prototype vertical axis machines remain under development, and these designs are of course being used at a micro windpower scale, the normal consensus is that the technology was tested in 1980/90’s and has lost out to the familiar “traditional” horizontal axis designs.

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