“Wind Power Plants” from pages 13-15 in Wind Energy Comes of Age published in 1995 by John Wiley & Sons.
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 machines in linear arrays along dikes and canals as needed. However, prior to the 1980s the concept, as applied to modern wind turbines, seemed revolutionary: the wind industry was in the business of building power plants and generating electricity with wind energy, not simply in the business of building wind turbines.
Reflecting the concept’s newness are the many terms that have arisen to describe it: wind farms, wind parks, wind power electrical generating facilities, wind-driven generating plants, wind power plants, and the related wind power stations. 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, such as 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 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 projects, using the word in Vindmφllepark. Southern California Edison officially endorses wind parks even though the utility labels its own power plants as generating stations. 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 were indeed power plants differing from conventional plants only in that they were wind-driven. From the utility sector hence came the expression wind-driven generating plant. Wind Power Stations is equally descriptive. The Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, for example, has formally adopted the term wind power stations. Subsequently these expressions were shortened to wind plant or wind station.
What then is a wind power plant? Generally it is any cluster of wind turbines used for the bulk generation of electricity. A wind plants contrasts with a single wind turbine used to meet on-site needs that characterized wind energy before development began in California. Wind plants vary widely in size. In California, project size has grown with the industry. Today wind plants range from 40 to 400 turbines. In Europe, arrays are much smaller, averaging in the tens of machines.
In contrast to North America the line between a cluster of wind turbines and a wind power plant is less distinct in Europe. In Great Britain, where there are few individual wind turbines, most wind turbines are installed commercially in wind plants. But British wind plants, some comprising only ten turbines, are more akin to clusters than the wind plants found in California.
Paul Gipe, “Wind Power Plants,” in Wind Energy Comes of Age (John Wiley & Sons, 1995), 13–15.
