News & Articles on Large Wind Power
Large wind turbines are those used to generate commercial quantities of electricity. This category includes single turbines used in distributed applications as well as arrays of multiple wind turbines used in a wind power plant.
Tariff design and LCOE: Why CfDs are more efficient than PPAsTariff design and LCOE:
By
Jérôme Guillet
From the regulator’s perspective, merchant projects do not provide any price protection for consumers even though their cost base is fixed – renewables projects will make “super profits” during price spikes. But they appear to be “subsidy-free”. And if they lead to PPA-backed structures, the benefits of the fixed price will go to the buyer – which these days is most likely to be one of the GAFAs (Google, Microsoft, Amazon). Thus relying on PPAs rather than CfDs is akin to indirectly giving subsidies to some of the richest corporates on earth…
DAF-Indal 50 kW Darrieus in the Pacheco Pass
By
Paul Gipe
The Canadian fabricator, DAF-Indal, installed a second generation 50 kW Darrieus turbine in 1981 at the the Romero Overlook Visitor …
Prototype 100 kW FloWind Darrieus Turbine Still Standing Idle in Washington State
By
Paul Gipe
NREL’s Owen Roberts reports that FloWind’s prototype 100 kW Darrieus wind turbine installed in early 1982 is still standing inoperative …
So how much of UK electricity could solar pv provide?
By
David Toke
Even in not-always-sunny UK solar pv could provide up to 40 per-cent of annual electricity production. That is without a significant amount of curtailment of production or even the need to convert the electricity into stored energy such as hydrogen. Of course this is dependent on there being enough provision of batteries. Solar plus batteries will be the dominant energy system in the world in future decades, but they will also be centrally important in UK.
Failed Dream: the Bearingless Wind Turbine Rotor of the Late 1970s
By
Paul Gipe
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.
UTRC, Windtech, Dynergy, & Composite Bearingless Rotor Timeline
By
Paul Gipe
For details on development of the Composite Bearingless Rotor and its derivatives see my accompanying article Failed Dream: the Bearingless …
