Sven Ruin, an engineering consultant with the family firm TEROC, has notified me that the former Swedish wind turbine manufacturer … Read more
News on Small Wind
Recently I was approached about an article I’d written in 2013 where I accused The Nature Conservancy of greenwashing. (See … Read more
On paper the composite bearingless rotor seemed too good to be true: a wind turbine rotor that enabled the blades to change pitch without bearings in the hub. And the wind turbine would passively use aerodynamic forces to orient the rotor downwind of the tower. It was the height of simplicity and would be cheap to build. What could go wrong? The short answer: everything. Eventually the nearly 400 wind turbines using the concept in California during the Great California Wind Rush of the early to mid 1980s were scraped off the face of the earth for scrap. And therein lays a sprawling tale.
For details on development of the Composite Bearingless Rotor and its derivatives see my accompanying article Failed Dream: the Bearingless … Read more
After arriving at NREL in February 2001, the Northern Power Systems’ NorthWind 100 wind turbine was used for a variety of wind energy research projects such as early hybrid wind/diesel systems for deployment in Alaska. In cooperation with NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Northern Power Systems developed the NorthWind 100 to demonstrate extreme cold-weather operation in Vermont, Colorado, Alaska, the South Pole, and eventually a futuristic application on Mars.
Later this week is the Folkecenter’s 8th Small Wind Conference, following quickly on the heels of the great Husum Wind … Read more
Despite the Tories best efforts to kill them, small-scale renewables have continued to grow under Britain’s pioneering feed-in tariff program. … Read more
Bergey Windpower, an American manufacturer of small wind turbines for residential and commercial applications, recently announced a new product, the Excel 15 wind turbine.
Britain, with one-fifth the population of the USA, installed 560 MW of wind generating capacity in distributed applications from 2010 through 2015. This represents more than three times the MW per capita installed through Britain’s microgeneration program than the distributed capacity installed in the United States.
The recorded small wind capacity installed worldwide has reached more than 830 MW as of the end of 2014. This is a growth of 10,9 % compared with 2013, when 749 MW registered. In 2012, 678 MW were installed. China accounts for 41 % of the global capacity, the USA for 30 % and UK for 15 %.
