I just accepted a job with Edmonton-based utility EPCOR, to be a manager for their Ontario wind projects. It’ll be based in Toronto.
(Look, I know the oM song is Good Morning Mr Edminton, but it’s too good a line to waste, okay?)
Category: Wind Things
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A little Irish festive spirit
If I stood on the bow-backed chair, I could reach
The light switch. They let me and they watched me.
A touch of the little pip would work the magic.— Seamus Heaney. Electric Light
and also Airtricity’s Christmas e-card
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How to stay warm, #1: The World’s Longest Serial Cable
Had to do some field work near Zurich yesterday, and it was way snowy. Only by having the world’s longest serial cable could I stay warm inside the truck while I did diagnostics. -
Dun Law Attitude Change
You can’t know how happy it makes me to read about the survey that shows that over 90% of people living closest to the Dun Law site supported their local wind farm. The early planning stages of this project were particularly fraught with opposition.
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Schultze Gets The Blues
It’s German, it’s funny (no, really), and it has wind turbines in it. Horst Krause is wonderful as the retired and bewildered Schultze, as he makes his quest for musical identity in the Deep South. -
big windfarm, big deal
So there was a stramash that the RSPB published a map showing where the Lewis wind farm would reach if it started in Edinburgh. Oh noes! Looks like it’d go all the way to Methil.
I’ve been working on a couple of medium-sized wind farms in Ontario. For top laughs, I tried overlaying them on Scotland, using streetmap.co.uk for the measurements.
Since I’m a weegie, I started at George Square. One of the farms would stretch all the way west by Wishaw, near Murdostoun Castle (and the comically-named town of Bonkle). The other would run north to somewhere between Fintry and Kippen, in Stirlingshire.
For those of you unlucky enough to be based east of Falkirk, I tried the same starting at Edinburgh Castle. The first wind farm would run west to the hamlet of Gilchriston, which is just north-west of Dun Law Wind Farm, which I worked on in the distant past. (If you run the farm west from Edinburgh, you end up in Bo’ness, which no-one would want to do.) The other design would end up somewhere between Kirkcaldy and Glenrothes, near Thornton — and not that far from Methil, a distance that the RSPB would have us believe is just too far for a wind farm.
So, where’s the news, RSPB? How did your land get somehow more precious than ours?
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Ontario RFP II
Ontario RFP II Winners are announced. Congratulations to all the successful parties.
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O turbine thou art sick
We had a component failure on the WindShare turbine today. Just when the winds have got really good, too. We know how to fix it, it’s just a matter of getting the people and the parts together.
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IEEE Toronto Talk
Looks like I’m waving my hands in the air and talking to the IEEE Toronto Section on Thursday October 27, 2005, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. It’s in the Business Building, Room BUS 108 at Ryerson University.
They fed me an exceptionally keen meal on Saturday night in advance thanks, so it’d better be a good talk from me.
Update, October 27: the slides are here — scruss.com/talks/02005/ieee_toronto — still in a kind of draft state. I used Eric Meyer’s fabulous S5 again.
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really winter
Further to winter, we’ve just had our first anemometer icing event in Alberta. Let it snow, etc.
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canwea over
Well, that’s CanWEA 2005 fully over. Yes, I’m still sifting through the contacts, brochures and swag I picked up, but it’s back to work for me.
I met a lot of people (including, quite unexpectedly, Stuart Hall of Natural Power in Scotland, whom I hadn’t seen in about 8 years), and the show seemed to be absolutely jumping. Could 2005/2006 be the year that Canada gets wind energy?
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review of CanWEA 2005 swag bag
So I’m at the 2005 CanWEA conference for the next few days. The swag bag is a standard nondescript nylon thing, thankfully big enough to take my iBook and a few other bits and pieces. The contents are a bit disappointing, though:
- a very plasticky flashlight that I may discard after harvesting its batteries.
- a small bag of jujubes.
- a copy of North American Windpower magazine (which in itself is quite a decent magazine, so is actually one of the highlights).
- a trade show guide, but no conference program (they were held up in customs; can’t we print ’em here?)
- various company brochures, zzzz.
You’ll note an absence of useful pens, pads, USB keys, model turbines, or other special swag. I was hoping for more …
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Debunking the 25% Myth
My dad called yesterday, asking, “Wind turbines do run for more than 25% of the time, don’t they?”. Seems he read an opinion piece in his favourite fair ‘n’ balanced rag (The Telegraph) that said that wind turbines only run 25% of the time.
I see this factoid popping up more and more from the anti-wind crowd. It’s a particularly difficult one to refute in the press, as by the time you’ve tried to explain the difference between capacity factor and operation time, you’ve lost them. Or gone over your allotted time/word count, at least.
I’ve got a year’s production data from WindShare/Toronto Hydro‘s turbine in front of me. It’s on a marginal site, one that probably wouldn’t be developed by a commercial entity. So, does it run for more than 25% of the time?
Yes; the turbine is generating 63% of the time. I’ve defined generating as providing a net export of power to the grid. Our turbine’s a bit more cranky than most, and I have a suspicion that our metering system is dropping some production, but even so, 63% is way more than the claimed 25%. So it gives me great pleasure to say:
MYTH: Wind turbines only run for 25% of the time.
BUSTED! Wind turbines run at the very least 60% of the time, usually more.(I can’t guarantee that Country Guardian won’t quote me out of context. I could make a cheap shot about not blaming them for their paymasters in the nuclear industry requiring value for money, but I won’t …)
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winter
We’ve had our first frost at a measuring site out in Alberta. From now on, it’s data censoring for frozen anemometers until April next year …
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all around the lakes
Had an impromptu visit to Port Burwell today to fix a cranky cell modem. It was also my first experience of driving a stick shift — and not just any stick shift, one with 400Kclicks on it — on the wrong side of the road. It was weird, but since I neither wrecked the car nor hit anything, I think I got the hang of it.
Anyway, no trip to Burwell is complete without a visit to the Lighthouse Restaurant for fresh fried lake perch. While I was there, I got chatting to a couple from Chicago who were working on their plan to cycle round a Great lake each summer. By doing this, they were hoping to appreciate the scale of these huge bodies of water. Neat plan.
One day, when I’m a Celebrity Windfarm Designer with my own television show, I’ll take a summer off to go round Lake Erie.
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Bullfrog Power
Bullfrog Power are all over the news today. Green power for consumers in Ontario.
I could have done with more wind in the mix (they’re 80% hydro, 20% wind) but it’s better than Pickering, Darlington, and all that nonsense.
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and all was quiet
The Ontario RFP deadline passed about four minutes ago. We can sleep now.
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windfarm or wind farm?
So how do you write it?
I use the former. Some people might say that the latter is more correct (one doesn’t refer to a pigfarm, after all), but we’re not really farming wind here. That we leave to the bean farmers (hohoho; I do believe that was the very same joke that Lord McAlpine used to use when showing bigwigs through the RES Ltd office in Hemel Hempstead).
I’d really prefer to use the term windpark, using the original meaning of park for an enclosed field. I guess it’s a bit European for most folks here, so it’s windfarm for me.
(One shouldn’t confuse a windfarm with WindFarm, the toolbox of choice for the leet wind haxx0r).
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CanWEA 2005
I’m going to the CanWEA Conference & Trade Show in October; are you?
It’s a shame their registration process only works under Windows, though.