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A Strategic Approach to Risk-Based Wind Development
Investing in a wind farm is an expensive business and can seem to be too risky for more cautious fund holders. Investors are more likely to be interested if it is possible for them to make a better informed decision on the projected financial returns. In particular, the estimate of how much energy the farm is likely to produce is critical to the final funding decision. The well-understood problem here is that energy production can only ever be an estimate during the planning phase, but how certain is that estimate? A new model makes it possible to be much more precise about the level of uncertainty and this should allow potential partners to define, and act on, the comfort zone within which they are prepared to work.
By Matthew Hendrickson, Vice President of Energy Assessment, and Francesca Davidson, Marketing Manager, Vaisala Inc. (formerly 3TIER), USA
- Category: Articles
Energy storage systems (ESSs) will be critical to the provision of an affordable, sustainable and secure electricity supply. ESSs support an increase in electricity consumed nearer to generation sources, bringing much needed cost efficiencies. They also make grids more flexible, reliable, resilient and stable. For example, when the frequency drops from its nominal value (which could cause parts of the network to shut down), frequency regulation enables energy companies to quickly ‘inject’ just the right amount of additional, controllable power into the grid. But what are the key challenges that need to be overcome from a technology, standards, market regulation and business model perspective?- Category: Articles
The method discussed in this article shows a low-cost approach to gain an insight into the wind conditions for a small wind turbine in the highly turbulent setting of the rooftop of a large building. Such an insight provides wind resource assessment and also guidance in micro-siting wind turbines.- Category: Articles
The emerging airborne wind sector continues to grow as small companies around the globe edge closer to commercialising innovative technologies. Boston-based Altaeros Energies is a pioneer in this field, securing the first approved and funded commercial demonstration of an airborne wind energy system in the USA. Altaeros is set to deploy its breakthrough 30kW wind turbine in Alaska in 2015. The Altaeros turbine will reach a height of 1,000 feet (300 metres), over 275 feet (83 metres) taller than the current record holder for the highest wind turbine, which is the Vestas V164-8.0-MW at the Danish National Test Centre for Large Wind Turbines.- Category: Articles
A research and development consortium (the ClusterDesign initiative) has now been running for nearly three years and recently completed its first round of activities. The partners in the project, which is partly funded by the European Union, have been trying to produce a series of interlinked models that can be put together to provide future designers of wind farms with a ‘Wind Cluster Controller’ and a 'ToolBox for Integrated Wind Farm Design'. These will help designers optimise the layout of turbines within a wind farm, and also improve the overall design of clusters of wind farms.- Category: Articles
The first wind turbines erected offshore were not designed for that environment. Tough lessons were learnt from the early installations in the open sea. Anything that could fail did fail, and that included rotor blades, which were found to require professional refurbishment much sooner than those on onshore turbines. In this article, Morgan Troedsson, of FORCE Technology, discusses the problems that can occur with blades on offshore turbines and how any damage can be assessed and dealt with.By Morgan Troedsson, Product Manager, FORCE Technology, Denmark
- Category: Articles
Three characteristics of wind energy (variability, uncertainty and asynchronism) can cause problems for maintaining a reliable and secure power system. Demand response, energy storage and improved wind power forecasting techniques have often been described as potential mitigation strategies. The focus of this article is on a mitigation strategy not often discussed and in some ways counterintuitive: the use of wind power to support power system reliability by providing active power control (APC) at fast timescales. APC is the adjustment of a resource’s active power in various response timeframes to assist in balancing the generation and load, thereby improving power system reliability.By Erik Ela, Yingchen Zhang, Paul Fleming and Vahan Gevorgian, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, USA
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