I’ve pulled out my discussion of wind power plants from several of my books and posted them individually. This version is from pages 3-4 of my book Wind Energy for the Rest of Us: A Comprehensive Guide to Wind Power and How to Use It.[1]
Wind Power Plants
Historically, wind turbines have been used to pump water or provide power at remote sites. This is still an important role even today, especially in the developing world and for those in developed countries who live “off-the-grid,” beyond the reach of power lines. In such applications, wind turbines are typically distributed as single units across the landscape. Wind turbines generating utility-compatible electricity can also be used individually, in small clusters, or concentrated in large arrays to generate bulk electricity much like any other power plant.
Before the 1980s, wind energy development focused on the individual wind turbine. By the late 1970s this perspective began to change, as attention shifted to maximizing collective generation from an array of many wind turbines. From today’s vantage point, this idea seems logically consistent with all prior utility experience: power plants are composed of several generating units.
The idea has historical precedents. At Kinderdyk and elsewhere in the Netherlands, the Dutch bunched clusters of windmills in linear arrays along dikes and canals as needed. However, prior to the 1980s, this concept–as applied to modern wind turbines–seemed revolutionary. The realization that the wind industry was in the business of building power plants and generating massive amounts of electricity with wind energy and was not simply in the business of installing wind turbines had profound effects.
What’s in a Name?
Reflecting the concept’s newness are the many terms that arose to describe it: wind farms, wind parks, and wind power plants, to name a few. Early on, finding the best nomenclature created a dilemma. On the one hand, advocates wanted a term connoting wind’s technological success and its coming of age as a conventional source of electricity, conveyed by the term wind power plant. On the other hand, proponents also wanted to preserve the association with the enlightened land use–the stewardship–that the term wind farm implies.
Wind farms is an expression that still finds adherents. Wind cognoscenti adopted the term in the late 1970s because wind generation and farming depend upon seasonal cycles, the turbines are planted in rows like fields of corn (maize), and there is a literary association between the rural areas where turbines are often sited and with harvesting a renewable crop. Yet the term’s agrarian overtones disturbed some. Financiers preferred a more sophisticated term for their well-heeled clientele, thus wind power electrical generating facility briefly gained currency in Southern California. Fortunately it died a quick death. But the financiers did point out a need for a more accurate description of wind projects.
The term wind parks grew out of the razzle-dazzle world of California real estate development in which groups of commercial buildings become “industrial parks.” The term is now pervasive throughout the world. Even the normally sober Danes have adopted it to describe some wind projects using the word Vindmøllepark. The word parks, however, carries with it connotations of sylvan landscapes or natural preserves protected from commercial use. Large assemblages of wind turbines can in no way be construed as parks. Critics might even charge that wind energy’s proponents deliberately choose to continue using the term parks for its positive connotations rather than the term plants with its utilitarian overtones.
Eventually it became evident to utility planners and engineers alike that these assemblages of wind turbines were indeed power plants differing from conventional plants only in that they were wind-driven. For simplicity, wind power plants is often shortened to simply wind plants.
What then is a wind power plant? Generally it is any cluster of wind turbines used for the bulk generation of electricity. Wind plants contrasts with a single wind turbine or a small cluster of turbines used to meet on-site needs.
See also.
- Wind Farm, Wind Plant, Wind Power Plant—Not Wind Parks (1997)
- Wind Power Plants: What are They? (1995)
[1] Paul Gipe, “Wind Power Plants,” in Wind Energy For the Rest of Us: A Comprehensive Guide to Wind Power and How to Use It (Wind-Works.org, 2016), 3–4.
