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- Category: Articles
A New Frontier in Renewable Energy Innovation
As renewable energy companies race to be at the forefront of the energy transition, the future is converging into a combination of photovoltaics, wind and storage. Innovation in the established wind sector has been slow with a tendency to upscale existing three-bladed turbines. Industry leaders continue to have problems with their technical development and deployment and are expected to not be able to meet future production demands required by the renewable energy development plans formulated by the European Union. Driven by the urge to accelerate the manufacturing and deployability of wind energy solutions, new players enter the field with creative and improved technologies. Kitekraft is leading the way with a radically different approach to harnessing the power of the wind: flying wind turbines.
By Christoph Drexler, Co-founder and Head of Business Development, Kitekraft, Germany
- Category: Articles
Challenges and Innovations in Wind Farm Performance Assessment
Ensuring that wind turbines operate at their maximum potential is critical for financial sustainability and the broader acceptance of wind energy. Power performance tests are essential to verify contractual turbine characteristics, optimise production, and refine energy yield estimates. Ideally, performance would be continuously monitored with high accuracy for all turbines.
By Samuel Davoust, Co-founder and Science Lead, Tipspeed, France
- Category: Articles
Wind turbine blade icing impacts approximately 65% of wind farms globally, leading to reduced power output, safety risks for workers and the public, and increased wear on turbine components. FabricAir has developed the BorealisWind Ice Protection System (BIPS), an innovative aftermarket solution designed to remove and prevent ice build-up on turbine blades and recover up to 75% of power losses caused by icing. The BIPS is part of FabricAir’s System as a Service model (see Figure 1), which emphasises a cyclical life-cycle approach to optimise performance while reducing the customer’s capex and minimising the product’s environmental impact. This article will use an anonymised case study to step through the life cycle of the BIPS, primarily focusing on the design tools and procedures used during inception.
By Dylan Baxter, PEng, Director of Technology for BorealisWind, FabricAir, Canada
- Category: Articles
How Weather Intelligence Is the Key to the Energy Transition
Globally, countries are in an energy transition, working to replace energy sources that produce carbon dioxide emissions with renewable sources like wind power to reduce emissions by 70% and set the world on the path to meeting climate goals.
By Chris Hyde, Meteorologist, Meteomatics, USA
- Category: Articles
Where There’s Wind, There’s Often a Surplus of Transmission Capacity
In 2023, Minnesota-based power collective Great River Energy completed a two-year study designed to identify the sources of congestion with the highest financial impact on its operations. It not only wanted to decrease costs, it wanted to figure out how to unlock untapped capacity on the congested lines.
By Jørgen Festervoll, CEO, Heimdall Power, Norway
- Category: Articles
Maximising Energy Production and Reducing Fatigue
Proper blade alignment in wind turbines is crucial for maximising energy production and reducing fatigue. This article explores a system that addresses pitch misalignment, enhancing turbine efficiency and longevity by ensuring each blade is pitched at the same angle. Pitch misalignment in wind turbines can significantly impact performance. When the blades are not uniformly pitched, it results in decreased aerodynamic efficiency and increased mechanical stress. Various factors can cause blade pitch to become misaligned, such as wear and tear on mechanical components, temperature variations, and human error during maintenance.
By Matthew Stead, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder, eologix-ping, Australia
- Category: Articles
Climate Change Impact on Yield-Relevant Parameters and Annual Energy Production
The question of how climate change will affect the energy yield of wind farms during their operating period has been increasingly raised at conferences and industry meetings. However, when determining wind potential, wind data from the past is generally used to determine the average wind and energy yield conditions to be expected during the future operating period of the planned wind farm. This is done under the assumption that the wind conditions of the past will also exist in the future. To consider climate change, GEO-NET studies its impact on the yield-relevant quantities and thus estimates the future yield of wind farms using various climate scenarios. The estimation is based on the coupling of an ensemble of regional climate projections from the CORDEX initiative for various representative concentration pathway scenarios with the computational fluid dynamics model FITNAH-3D. Exemplary results of the applied method are given, and their significance is discussed.
By Simone Pfau, GEO-NET Umweltconsulting, Germany
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