Tag: wind

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 …)

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.

keyed up

Aiee, I forgot how a keyboard under Windows works! I’m hitting Backspace when it’s wanting Delete, and Alt when it wants Ctrl.

Macs’ll do that to ya, eh?

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).

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.

Massive Yawn

I went to Bruce Mau‘s Massive Change exhibit at the AGO on Sunday. Mistake.

My defining experience of the show wasn’t actually meant to be part of the exhibit. In the ‘Massive Café’, there were vacuum-flask coffee dispensers. If you put your cup in the round cup guide, the dispensed coffee missed the cup. They had been set up wrongly, and like the rest of the show, it was half-assed and missed the mark.

The energy section was a joke. Dominating the room was some awful hybrid vertical-axis wind turbine, with both a Savonius rotor and an aerofoil at the edge. That would be like yoking a cart horse to a thoroughbred; neither would work well together. The tiny generator at the bottom was an indication of the measly amount of power they expected to get out. The rest of the room was the usual gee-whiz “Hydrogen and Stirling Engines will Save The World!” stuff. Z.

The Transportation room was equally amusing. Three of the personal vehicles featured have been less than successful: the Myers Sparrow (whose previous incarnation, the Corbin Sparrow, went bankrupt), the Twike (again, reported to have gone into receivership), and best of all, the Sinclair C5. If you’re from the UK, and about my age, you’ll remember the C5 as a total sales, marketing and design disaster. Sir Clive Sinclair, who could previously do no wrong, became a laughing-stock because of it.

Also in the transport section, they featured a bike rickshaw and a bicycle stretcher-bearer. It was fairly obvious that these bikes were based on 19th century technology, as they were heavy roadsters, possibly even sensible bicycles. And this is massive how?

The ‘Massive Thinkers’ gallery featured such luminaries as Sam Walton. And selling cheap crap is massive how? Massive parking lots?

There were also numerous typos in the signage. C’mon guys, get a Massive Spelling Checker!

In the Transport section, they could have featured transit systems, and perhaps featured HPVs from Brompton (inter-modal folding goodness), Moulton (wee wheels and spaceframes), Leitra (fully-enclosed velomobiles) and HP Veloteknik (much recumbentness). In energy, they could have posed the question, “Do we really need always-on power, since we’ve had it for less than 1% of the history of civilisation?”

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.

stewart speaks!

When: Thursday 10th March 2005, 6–7pm

Where: Bahen Centre BA 2179 (40 St George St., Toronto)

What: As part of the ESC/EWB Power Shift lecture series, I’m giving the following talk:

Stewart Russell currently works for Zephyr North, a wind energy consulting company. As an executive of Windshare, he contributed his years of experience in the Scottish wind industry to establishing the TREC wind turbine now installed at the CNE. His presentation will contrast the case of large, industrial wind farms with the technological solutions that are appropriate for developing countries. He will outline the special issues that arise when siting and designing modern wind farms in Ontario, and discuss the special challenges of creating simple, small wind turbines out of locally available materials.