- Category: Articles
A Secret to Success for Offshore Wind Turbines

By David Cerda Salzmann and Jan van der Tempel, Delft University of Technology Offshore Engineering, the Netherlands
- Category: Articles
Sluggish Offshore Wind Faces Delays before Tapping Major Potential

By Keith Hays, Director of Global Wind Research, Emerging Energy Research, USA
- Category: Articles
Design Considerations and Approaches
In the pursuit to increase the megawatts per surface area and to maximise the megawatts/hour output per project dollar the size of wind turbines has been increasing steadily. To capture the higher winds and to accommodate the larger rotor diameter the hub heights have also been steadily increasing. Wind park prospectors and promoters are now required to measure at greater heights than ever before. From 40 to 50 then to 60 metres, the minimum level now seems to be the 80-metre level. The traditional tubular anemometric masts have not been able to go beyond the 60-metre level without becoming inordinately heavy. However, by revisiting the 250-year old Euler column equations and by using the aircraft design approach, a new lightweight structure is now able to achieve the 80-metre measurement at a fraction of the cost of the traditional lattice tower.

By Pierre-Guy Charette, Ohmega Group, Canada
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- Category: Articles
Utilising Energy Storage

By Richard Baxter, Senior Technology Analyst, Ardour Capital Investments, USA
- Category: Articles
Drilling Monopiles for Offshore Wind Turbines

By Manfred G. Beyer and Wolfgang G. Brunner, BAUER Maschinen GmbH, Germany
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- Category: Articles
Preliminary Results from New Modelling Study
Optimising the layout of an offshore wind farm is an iterative process, and adds expense to wind farm development. The Offshore Wind Farm Layout Optimization (OWFLO) project seeks to streamline this process by uniting efficient optimisation algorithms with models of offshore farm costs and energy production. Most software configures farms for maximum energy production, but this does not account for the significant, site-specific costs of components such as the support structure and electrical interconnection. The OWFLO software instead models the levelised production cost to identify the combination of maximum energy production and minimum cost of energy that best suits the site. This article summarises the initial scope and progress of this project and presents a comparison with data from an actual offshore wind farm. The overall energy and cost of energy estimations compare well with the real data, and methods for further improvement of the models are described.
By Christopher Elkinton, James Manwell and Jon McGowan, University of Massachusetts, USA
- Category: Articles
The Impact on Navigation of an Offshore Wind Farm

By Michael Starling, BMT Renewables Limited (a subsidiary of BMT Limited), UK