Wind Power Silent Revolution: New Wind Turbines for Light Wind Sites
A guest article by French expert Bernard Chabot.
Renewables International, 6 May 2013.
More generation and higher penetration rates relative to installed capacity
- Expanded opportunities through lower-wind sites
- Less opposition to wind as less high-wind, high-value sites are required
- Less demand on grid operators
- Less demand for new transmission capacity or capacity upgrades
On grid integration
. . . will represent a strategic advantage for large-scale integration of wind energy in the electricity system, as a larger amount of TWh would delivered with a total lower total installed power and near the places of consumption, reducing the cost of transmission and distribution.
The ideas were already in the RI publication “Wind power silent revolution” (attached), I suggest you quote for example the underlined part :
” GRID OPERATORS WILL BENEFIT ALSO FROM THIS SILENT REVOLUTION With higher average national, regional and local Nh and capacity factors values, adapting transport and distribution grids to large amounts of wind energy production will be easier and least costly: wind production would be easier to locate in areas of large electricity consumption, lowering transmission costs; and for a specific target in TWh/year, corresponding installed wind power in GW will be lower than with conventional wind turbines with low specific values Su. So, the required peak transmission capacity of the grid would be lower, a huge advantage both for existing grids to adapt and for new grids to develop specifically for wind power. And last but not least, the number of hours of operation of those new wind farms at rated power will be higher than with low and very low Su wind turbines, an advantage for grid management and offer-demand balance prevision and adjustments “x”.
