work as if you live in the early days of a better nation
I haven’t heard a peep out of Talk Energy since 25 January, so I’m afraid to say it must have disappeared. The site no longer resolves for me. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. I wish Darrin well with his next (current?) project.
Oops, spoke too soon. Talk Energy has started resolving again. It’s just that their RSS feed was broken.
Remember how I said that I can’t tell anyone?
Well, today Provincial Energy Minister Dwight Duncan announced the successful projects in the Ontario’s renewable energy RFP. To quote the Bloomberg story:
Wind farms will generate most of the power from these announced projects, adding 355 megawatts electricity to the province. Superior Wind Energy Inc., Erie Shores Wind Farm LP, Canadian Hydro Developers Inc., and Epcor Utilities Inc. are behind the wind projects.
[link/emphasis mine]
As co-designer of the Erie Shores Wind Farm turbine layout, it’s great to see some more wind turbines being built.
So I’m busy doing windfarm photomontages in hugin. Trouble is, the site I’m working on is in the prairies, so here’s some ASCII art of what I’m seeing:
___________________________________________________
This, as you might guess, is just a little short of control points for stitching images. I find myself scrabbling for clods of earth, interesting blades of grass, and what looks worryingly like roadkill by the side of the range roads to use as common points of interest.
So far, though, most of the panoramas have come out looking pretty good. But then, I am 1337 VV1NDF4R^^ D3516N0R …
Ever had some really good news that you can’t tell anyone immediately? That’s me at the moment. I can spill the beans next Wednesday. Woohoo!
These are nested sections from two 60m NRG Systems TallTower masts. Paul and I unloaded two of these. They were heavy.
I’ve been using the Symphonie Data Retriever utility for the NRG Symphonie wind dataloggers. I just discovered that the *.NSD site files in C:\NRG\SiteFiles are MS Access databases. This could mean that users could write their own custom data analysis tools outside NRG’s software.
And I though they were just big ol’ binary files, too.
From the resolutions from the upcoming Ontario Liberal Party Conference:
Be it resolved that the Government of Ontario encourage the use of renewable energy by implementing Advanced Renewable Tariffs that will allow distributed solar, small hydro, or wind energy to be established by farmers, co-ops, and locally owned enterprises and to be able to market this energy on the provincial grid.
Be it further resolved that the Government of Ontario make a subsidy available for the purchase and installation of all major Green” technologies which can be utilized to provide energy for residential dwellings, offices businesses and industry (products such as geothermal heat systems, solar-assisted hot water heaters, heat pumps, small-scale wind generators, net metering equipment, etc.).
I think we have Paul Gipe to thank for that.
Simple wind calculators: http://wind.scruss.com/windcalcs.html
Currently:
It’s something to do to hone my mad JavaScript skillz whilst on the train.
Last night, the US Congress voted to extend the Wind Energy Production Tax Credit (PTC) to the end of 2005. This should allow approximately US $2B of projects to go ahead.
This should help stabilize the whole wind industry in North America. It means that manufacturers don’t have to deal with such a boom and bust market. Pity it was all buried in such a shamelessly vote-winning tax cut package, though.
Well, as of noon, the Ontario Renewable Energy RFP deadline has passed. That means I can take a short break from wind farm design.
Darrin Mitchell & Paul Gipe
I had the pleasure of finally meeting Darrin Mitchell, of TalkEnergy.com, at OSEA‘s office in downtown Toronto. He was in talking to Paul Gipe, who gave Darrin a signed copy of his latest book, Wind Power: Renewable Energy for Home, Farm, & Business
Re: An ill wind?, article by John Vidal.
Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2004 22:05:44 -0400
To: weekly.letters@…
Subject: An Ill Wind to Dr Bellamy’s WalletFurther to John Vidal’s article on wind energy in the UK, I am astounded by David Bellamy’s gall in denouncing wind energy. He must think we have extremely short memories indeed.
Back in the early 1990s, when I was a neophyte windsmith, I remember seeing a CEGB-sponsored film about wind energy. It was narrated by Dr B., and he was effusing about how wind turbines would be a familiar part of the future landscape, about how beneficial they are, and all the good things that mindful wind energy development will bring.
One wonders what caused the good doctor’s volte-face against green electricity. It would be a shame if such a familiar public face would say anything that it were paid to say. One wonders if David Bellamy now has a backer with an agenda different from that of the old CEGB?
Stewart C. Russell
Anent my previous rant about Windsave claiming impossible efficiencies, they’ve made some changes to their website. The machines now have larger diameters (1250 and 1750 mm — up from 1000 and 1400mm), and much lower rated power (500W and 1000W at 27mph — down from 750 and 1200).
Plugging in those numbers to Cp = P / ( 0.48106 d2 v3 ), we get more realistic efficiencies of 0.378 and 0.386 (for the small and large machines, respectively).
The Lakota turbine we installed last week has a nominal rated power of 900W at 28.8 mph for a 2.09m diameter rotor. It has a very conservative Cp = 0.20, although David Cooke says that typically they see 1,000 Watts at around 25mph (a Cp of around 0.34).
At the other end of the scale, the Lagerwey LW52 is a 51.5m diameter machine rated at 750kW at 12ms-1. This advanced utility scale, variable pitch machine has a Cp = 0.34.
Windsave’s revised figures are much more credible, but until we have real figures backed by a few years of installations, there’s little more we can say about them. I’m a little concerned that, although there are claims that 1000s of these machines have been sold, there’s not a single real photo of one on the web.
I’m going to enjoy putting up an anemometer and logging system alongside the urbine downtown. We’ll see how it runs.
Popular Science readers: Please note that I have nothing to do with these companies, and so I can’t send you information about them. Please visit their websites instead.
Windside: http://www.windside.com (Finland) and Windaus Energy: http://windausenergy.com (Canada; site doesn’t render properly in Mozilla): both with near-identical twisted-savonius designs. Oh yeah, and a nice line in carping at the rest of the wind energy industry: There are no flying ice blocks, leaking oil or cutting blades.
(Windaus); Most turbines don`t simply work. There is one turbine, which works.
(Windside).
It should be pointed out that Savonius designs, being drag devices, are much less efficient than standard three-bladed horizontal-axis machines, which use lift. If you need a design without guywires, take a look at the Proven Energy machine. It’s very solid, and Scottish, too.
One has to wonder about lone voices in the wilderness. Once they start to drown each other out, it gets hard to tell which are the real deal, and which are not.
I survived the University of Toronto First Sustainable Energy Fair. The weather was pretty grim, despite the cold and the rain. Maybe some of the solar cooking events didn’t happen, but that didn’t dampen the spirits of all involved.
There was a good crowd, and I talked myself hoarse on the WindShare stand. There were some interesting people there, including the irrepressible Tom Karmo, and UofT‘s own cyborg, Steve Mann. And yes, I am really responsible for getting Winton Dahlström into wind energy; mea maxima culpa.
I have pictures of the sustainable energy fair here.
From early April, I will be a contracting engineer for Zephyr North, a wind consultancy in Burlington. It’s taken me 7 years to get back into wind energy, but it’ll be good to be back.
Oh yeah, I’ll be working in Fortran again. Strange to think that my dad was also a Fortran programmer…
Seems to be UK only, but quite pretty and useful.
Glasgow has a Science Centre. Glasgow Science Centre has a 150m tall tower that is supposed to turn with the wind. Unfortunately, its main bearing has been broken since 2002, and it has been closed to the public.
Glasgow is a windy city. I spent more than 30 years of my life there. You could put a wind turbine there, and not merely would it be attractive, it would be educational and would earn some revenue for the centre.
If WindShare can build urban wind turbines, so can Glasgow.
(click on the above for a larger image)
Yes, I’ll be speaking at UofT on 20th February.
The Proven Windlogger is clever. It uses a simple bike computer (looks like a Cat-Eye Velo) to measure wind run.
I know that Gordon Proven is a bit of a bike-nut, back from my days with the BWEA. This is the sort of simple, neat design that Proven does so well.