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- Category: Articles
How Do We Get Beyond Blockage?The notion of wind farm blockage has recently created significant debate and raised many unanswered questions within the wind industry. Does blockage actually exist? Could it explain historical differences between pre-construction and operational yield assessments? What should we do about it? Here Frazer-Nash provides some of the latest thinking about understanding and predicting blockage.
By Graham Hawkes, Engineering Manager, Frazer-Nash Consultancy, UK
- Category: Articles
Saving Blades Using their Acoustic SignatureIt has recently been shown by the team at the University of Massachusetts Lowell that the acoustic signature generated by a turbine itself can be used to detect blade damage. This acoustics-based blade structural health monitoring approach will help minimise blade failures and lower the levelised cost of energy through a reduction in O&M costs. The proposed solution consists of low-cost, easy-to-implement acoustic sensors and a central data processing and wireless data transmission unit. The monitoring solution can be installed on both new and existing wind turbines.
By Murat Inalpolat, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA
- Category: Articles
Understanding Best Practices for Data StandardisationENTR is an industry alliance set up to promote open-source standards within the wind sector. Among its participants are leading owner-operators, software vendors, a trade association, and a governmental organisation.
By Charles Henderson, CEO, Stacker Group, USA
- Category: Articles
Preliminary Framework for Wind Farm Siting and SizingA high cost of licensed micro-siting software, a lack of reliable ground-based wind resource data and difficulty assessing geographically morphed areas of the country make it challenging for project developers in Nepal to perform preliminary siting and tangible evaluations of large-scale wind projects. Furthermore, areas with the most promising wind resource profiles in Nepal are usually located in rural and remote regions with poor accessibility and limited aggregated geographical data, and they are often isolated from electrical grid infrastructures. As such, identification of suitable locations for developing wind projects requires complex multi-criterion analysis, which in turn requires upfront investment. This article elaborates on a necessity-driven framework for wind farm siting and sizing that can process freely available project-specific parameters, geospatial data and factual information to identify project locations and produce quantitative figures for electricity generation.
By Ayush Acharya, WindPower Nepal, Nepal
- Category: Articles
Reducing the Maintenance Cost of Electrical Parts and Controls
This article introduces, and shows by an example, the feasibility of a concept for a future wind turbine gearbox. The concept is based on the potential in the present wind turbine gearbox structure that is not utilised. The objective is to reduce the maintenance cost of the electrical parts and controls in a modern wind turbine.By Ahmad Hemami, McGill University, Canada
- Category: Articles
Towards a System of Record for Condition Monitoring and Advanced AnalyticsIn the quest to further reduce the levelised cost of energy, condition monitoring (CM) and advanced analytics (AA) approaches play predominant roles. Differing in their requirements, costs and scope they are typically considered separately and not in combination. In best-case scenarios, analysts in each field work in silos rather than in collaboration. However, asset owners and operators have always been pushing towards a unified and integrated source of data to inform their O&M operations. Given the ever-decreasing cost of cloud-based storage and processing one could imagine that they may be getting closer to this. In the meantime, there are a few simple ideas worth exploring to get CM and AA analysts closer to achieving that goal.
By Dariush Faghani, Senior Engineer, Power Factors, USA
- Category: Articles
How Collection System Cabling Impacts the Finances of a Project
Medium-voltage collection system cable sizing has a large impact on the finances of any wind or solar project. The engineering decisions that go into sizing this cable directly impact the upfront capex of the project. Therefore, it is imperative that all wind and solar project stakeholders understand how cable sizes can impact the finances of a project and what tools may be available to influence that cost. Some cable sizing decisions will have a positive impact on the contractor or developer, and some may have a positive impact on the project owner. Understanding the impact of cable sizing on your organisation’s finances is important for you to be successful in your particular enterprise.By Lucas Cook, NEI Electric Power Engineering, USA
