Category: Wind Things

It’s pouring at Erie Shores

Pouring a turbine foundation, Erie Shores Windfarm
I was at Erie Shores on Wednesday, and this is the first turbine base of this size I’ve seen poured. They’re pretty big, but then, they do have to support a 77m diameter turbine on an 80m tower.

The picture’s taken from here.

there is no nuclear revival

Nuclear Power’s Scorned Small-Scale Competitors Are Walloping It in the Marketplace (PDF-100k)
Lovins Debunks the Notion That Nuclear Energy is the Best Investment Against Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Global Climate Change

Snowmass, Colorado, June 20, 2005 — Rocky Mountain Institute researchers today doused the hype about “nuclear revival” in an icy bath of real-world data. They documented that worldwide, the decentralized, low- or no-carbon sources of electricity — cogeneration and renewables, all claimed by nuclear advocates to be too small and too slow to help much with climate change — are already bigger than nuclear power and are quickly leaving it in the dust.

say something, anything …

It really annoys me that Natural Power Consultants have been so quiet about a blade failure at Crystal Rig. Not merely has it taken them two months to start repairs, but they haven’t come out with a news release saying what happened, how unlikely it is to happen again, and reassuring everyone that this is a) very unusual, and b) fully under control.

Wind farm operators aren’t alone. The actions of one in one country affects the industry worldwide. I mean, we’re even seeing questions in Ontario based on the Altamont experience. So, c’mon people, get hep.

Swift Turbine Specs Look Dubious

“Oh no, not again!” I’m saying to myself, and really hoping that — just once — I’ve done my sums wrong.

You’ve seen my rant about how the initial public specification of the WindSave rooftop wind turbine was an impossibility (and, in fairness to them, how the corrected specs are much more like the thing). And you may have seen that I’ve written about the Swift before. But the Renewable Devices Swift was all over the blogosphere (a hateful word, I must say) today; both Treehugger and sustainablog were on it.

So I download the very pretty PDF spec sheet. Here’s the technical table from the document, which is dated 19 November 2004:
swift wind turbine spec, from document dated 2004/11/19
So that’s a diameter of 2m, rated wind speed of 10.5ms-1, and a rated power of 1.5kW. Plugging that into my simplified Cp equation

Cp = P / ( 0.48106 d2 v3 )

which gives:

Cp = 1500 / ( 0.48106 × 22 × 10.53 ) = 0.67

As this is higher than the Betz Limit of 0.59, the claimed power output of the Swift wind turbine is theoretically impossible.

I don’t know how to put this, but rooftops are sheltered places; if they get any wind at all, it tends to be turbulent and highly directional. You get huge updrafts, none of which help generate power. I know of some very open sites that struggle to get the 3.5ms-1 cut-in speed of the Swift, and that speed is at 50m+, not on a rooftop.

Renewable energy, for me, is about using the appropriate technology for the right location. Devices like the Swift are a distraction from the whole conservation/renewables agenda.

wind turbines from space

Update April 2007: I’ve created a Google My Maps page for these locations: Wind Turbines from Space.

Messing about with Google Maps, I went looking for wind turbines. And yup, you can see ’em:

Update, 3rd May: following my posting to awea-windnet, I got three more:

Thanks to David Wright for the California location, and Joe Duddy of RES (my old employer!) for the two from England. I’ve spent quite a bit of time on the latter two windfarms.

Update, 6 May: Found a couple more windfarms from space on googleglobetrotting.com:

Update, 20 June: Google now has worldwide coverage.

Update, 29 June:

  • McBride Lake, Alberta — image taken while in construction. You can see the tower sections and the blades laid out. You can even make out the crane installing one of the northern turbines. This is a Vision Quest Windelectric project.

old-school electronics

old-school electronics
Some kind of calibrated load cell for kite wind speed measurements. Packed it a beautiful wooden box, we found a couple of these in the office this afternoon.

my wind-powered PC

As a thank-you for speaking at the ESC/EWB Power Shift lecture series, I was given a Pembina Institute Wind Powered PC tag. That means that the energy equivalent of three years of PC usage has been bought for me from a windfarm.

I’d like to thank the folks at UofT for putting up with me for the evening, and buying me dinner at the (in)famous Peel Pub (would that be innfamous?). I enjoyed it, and I hope they did too.