Lee Devlin's Weblog

A few weeks ago I visited the National Renewable Energy Lab open house in Golden, CO with a few other members of the Northern Colorado Clean Energy Network. I'd wanted to see this facility for some time, and figured that an open house on a Saturday would allow some of our members who normally are unable to attend our energy tours during the week to join us. As it turned out, we only had 4 members of our group show up. Despite the low turnout, we had a good time carpooling there and back because we got to chat for a few hours about renewable energy topics.

The NREL has a visitor's center and there was a presentation in progress when we arrived about how to do an energy audit on one's home. Several of us had just been to an NCRES presentation on this topic recently so we did not sit down to listen to the presentation. The presentation took up much of the visitor's center display area, making it impossible to talk without disrupting the presentation so our ability to wander around inside was a bit limited.

The exhibits were very nicely constructed and a docent explained the various renewable energy programs underway and the purpose of the various buildings on the campus. There are numerous projects going on all over the facility, but unfortunately they are off-limits for visitors. Only the visitor's center is accessible. I had expected this to be the case, and so I tried to gather some information about what would be necessary to get a tour of the actual laboratories in the hope that some future visit would allow us to get better access to what's going on in the labs. I can see that it will be a challenge as they are not set up to handle tours of the actual labs.

The docent who was our guide had spent most of his career in the power field, and I had a long discussion with him about transmission of power over high voltage DC lines. Transmitting power over DC lines is counter-intuitive for most engineers who were taught that you can only transmit utility scale power on AC lines. But thanks to advances in high power semiconductor components to handle utility scale power, DC power transmission lines are becoming more common to deliver electrical power long distances and to help isolate grids through interties. This method of transmitting power will become more important in the future as some of the best potential sources of renewable power generation such as wind and solar tend to be far removed from population centers. HVDC power transmission has the advantage of being able to isolate the grids so that the need to control the phase of the AC power over long distances is not required. The largest DC line in the U.S. is the Pacific DC Intertie which takes hydroelectric power from the Columbia River in Washington State and delivers it to customers in the Los Angeles area.

My favorite Visitor's Center exhibit was the section of the GE 37-meter wind turbine blade. I've seen these blades up close during our Ponnequin Wind Farm tour, but was curious about the materials of construction. With the section exposed, I saw that the materials looked identical to those used in my LongEZ and Cozy. They consisted of wood, foam, fiberglass, and epoxy albeit on a much larger scale that what is used in my planes.

Labels: energy, technology, wind

I've written before about Vestas, a Danish wind turbine manufacturer that built a blade facility in Windsor, CO about 10 miles from where I live. I was out flying around the other day and took an aerial photo of the plant and found that they had more than 70 blades on their property. I was impressed because they hadn't even broken ground at this time last year and they are already up and producing blades. They had started out with a planned capacity of 1200 blades per year, but announced a 50% expansion while the plant was still under construction. They feel as if the U.S. will continue forward with wind development, despite our government's reluctance to commit to a long-term strategy when it comes to renewable energy.

The amount of energy that this blade plant produces annually will generate enough electricity to power about 400,000 homes. I computed this by de-rating the 600 sets of blades to 1/3 of their 2 MW nameplate capacity. This is similar to the amount of power generated annually from a conventional coal-fired power plant.

I subscribe to a Google Alert for news on Vestas, and on Friday morning I found out that Vestas will be building a new facility in Colorado to manufacture steel towers for their turbines. The facility will employ 400 people and be capable of producing 900 towers per year. They didn't specify a location, but according to the Northern Colorado Business Report, it appears that several communities in Northern Colorado are under consideration.

Labels: energy, wind

One person's eyesore can be another person's art. Modern wind turbines fascinate me. I find them to be graceful and stately works art. I do realize that not everyone feels the same way, for example, a small yet powerful group of people living around Cape Cod.

I was visiting my home town near Wilkes-Barre, PA last September and was gratified to see 12 wind turbines up on the eastern ridge of the Wyoming Valley spinning slowly while generating clean and renewable energy. When operating at their full capacity, the turbines collectively provide enough electricity to power about 24,000 homes. I had to get up close to them for a better look. I wrote a blog article about it last October.

I received an email the other day from someone in Australia asking for permission to use one of the images from that article to promote an arts festival. It’s the image of me standing with 3 wind turbines in the forest behind me. They plan to print it on 30,000 brochures and 2000 posters. I think that’s an appropriate use for that image, to promote an arts festival. Something tells me the organizers must have good artistic taste. :-)

Labels: energy, wind

The Northern Colorado Clean Energy Network conducted a field trip on Friday, November 30^th 2007 to visit the Ponnequin Wind Farm. This wind farm is located just south of the Colorado-Wyoming border and about 2 miles east of Interstate 25. We had a total of 21 attendees. We met at the Fort Collins Park-n-Ride and carpooled to the site where we met with Ken Bolin, Senior Engineer at Xcel Energy who hosted us on the tour.

The weather was chilly in Fort Collins, about 17 F with light winds, but we all knew that it would be colder and windier at the site. Sure enough, as we got closer to Wyoming the outside air temperature had dropped to 11 F with a wind blowing around 15-20 mph. As we got into Wyoming, the cloud ceilings began to descend, making me wonder if we’d even be able to see the wind turbines.

As we arrived at the entrance gate, Ken was unlocking it and some light snow was beginning to fall, sideways of course, which is the direction that snow always seems to fall in Wyoming. In the few minutes that I left my vehicle to talk to Ken the cold wind chilled me to the bone. I’ve been to Wyoming in the winter on quite a few occasions and yet I still cannot get used to how much colder its weather can be than Colorado’s. The wind chill factor was breathtaking, to say the least.

We followed Ken as we drove for about 3 miles along dirt roads. We were only able to see the turbines when we got within a quarter mile from them and even then could only see the bottoms of the spinning blades because the clouds were so low that the tops of the towers and blades disappeared into them. We parked our vehicles and assembled in the maintenance building where Ken told about the site’s history and many other interesting facts about the wind turbines.

After the ceilings lifted, we were able to see all the turbines.

The Ponnequin Wind Farm is Colorado’s first wind farm and was built in several phases starting in 1998. The first phase consisted of seven 750 kW NEG-Micon turbines with a total capacity of 5 MW. A year later, 22 more 750 kW NEG-Micon turbines were installed bringing up the total generating capacity to 21 MW. In 2001, 15 more 660 kW Vestas turbines were installed which brought the capacity of the wind farm to about 31 MW with a total of 44 turbines. I should mention that wind farms are rated at their maximum generating capacity, but they don’t generate at their maximum capacity all the time. A wind farm that is positioned on a good site will generate about 30-35% of its maximum capacity averaged over the course of a year. This percentage, known as the capacity factor, can go higher if the winds tend to be more consistent, such as they are for off-shore wind farms. We also found that in North America, the capacity factor varies considerably throughout the year. For example, the months of April through September may only have an average capacity factor of 10%, whereas during the months from October through March it can be as high as 70%.

People are always trying put generating capacity in perspective and so you’ll often hear that a wind turbine can power a certain number of homes. A general rule of thumb is that each household consumes about 1 kW of energy on a continual basis so 1 MW of generating capacity is enough to power 1000 average homes. Electrical power is sold by the kWh and since there is an average of 730 hours per month, the above rule of thumb would imply that an average household consumes about 730 kWh per month. This average household energy consumption has been creeping up steadily so you may find that it varies depending on the date of the reference. I should also mention that the cost per kWh varies considerably over the U.S. from a low of $.051/kWh in West Virginia to a high of $.208/kWh in Hawaii with the average hovering around $.10/kWh. In Europe, the cost is closer to twice the average U.S. rate.

Estimating an annualized capacity factor of around 30%, this 31 MW facility should generate about 9.3 MW x 8760 hours/year x $.10 kWh x 1000 KW/MW = $8,150,000/year worth of electricity. This would be enough to power 9300 homes. The cost of generating the electricity at this site is $.057/kWh so it would appear to be profitable for Xcel, although there are other power distribution costs that I'm not including. But if you take into consideration that power companies are able to charge a premium for wind energy, then it should all tend to even out. In the case of Xcel Energy, they do this through their Windsource program which effectively adds about another $.01/kWh to the retail price. I participate in this program and so about one third of the electricity I use in my home effectively comes from wind power.

Ken explained that the major factors that influence the selection of wind farm's location are the speed and consistency of winds throughout the year, its ease-of-access, and its proximity to power distribution lines. High voltage power distribution lines can significantly add to the expense of the wind project if they have to be extended very far since it costs about $500,000 per mile to build them. Today wind farms cost about $1800 per kW to construct which is nearly twice what it cost 10 years ago. This is largely due to increases in the cost of raw materials such as concrete, copper, and steel in addition to the increased demand for turbines.

One of the common concerns expressed about wind farms is their effect on local wildlife, but in the case of the Ponnequin site, there doesn’t seem to be much, if any, interference with the wildlife in the area. The wildlife that inhabits the site includes deer, elk, antelope, fox, coyote, ground squirrels, badgers, and, of course, birds. The antelope appreciate the shade of the towers provide in the hot sun during the summer and will line up and lay down in its shadow and then continue to move as the sun changes the position of the shade. Cattle are also allowed to graze on the property and on occasion have been known to stand in a line at the fence and stare curiously at the turbines.

Bird strikes have been very minimal with only about 20 birds killed per year at the site. Only one raptor has been killed in the 9 years the site has been operating. To put it in perspective, for every bird killed by a wind turbine, 250,000 are killed by domestic cats, cars, and controlled flight into windows.

With generating capacities of 660 to 750 kW each, the Ponnequin turbines are smaller than the ones that are being delivered today which are averaging between 1 to 2 MW each. Even so, they are still impressive in size and you can really appreciate it when you get up close to them. The blades are 70 feet in length and are mounted on a hub that is positioned 170 feet in the air. The NEG-Micon blades are fixed pitch, but have a 12 foot tip section that is hydraulically actuated when the wind speed exceeds 57 mph. When that happens, the tip sections pop out and rotate 90 degrees and this slows down the blade so that it can be stopped by a disc brake mounted inside the nacelle. This is done to protect the blades, gearbox, and generator from being destroyed in high winds. Once the wind slows down enough, the tips retract and the turbine will automatically begin spinning again. Ken told us that winds exceeding 90 mph have been recorded on the site and that during the windy season, it’s not unusual to experience 3 or 4 shutdowns due to high winds each month. In the case of the Vestas turbines, the blades are variable pitch so they are able to adjust their angle to get the maximum energy out of the wind at low speeds and at high speeds, they can be rotated to slow down the rotor enough until the disc brake can stop it completely.

The blades have built-in lightning protection in the form of conductive members buried inside the fiberglass/epoxy blades to attract and conduct the energy of a lightning strike to ground which protects the blades from damage. Ken mentioned that some wind turbines were installed in Wyoming that did not have lightning protection and during a weekend of thunderstorms a number of turbines experienced catastrophic blade damage. So lightning protection in the blades is very important.

NEG-Micon blade 70 feet long.

Many of our group’s questions were related to the costs to run the wind farm and reliability of the turbines. Ken said there are 3 full-time employees required to run site and mentioned that the annual maintenance budget varied considerably from year to year depending on what needed to be replaced. He related an incident when some improperly torqued bolts had caused a nacelle complete with gearbox, generator, and rotor to tilt over and fall 170 feet to the ground while it was spinning, completely destroying everything in the process. The resulting damage was nearly $750K. A blade sets cost around $250K and an equal amount is required for a new generator and gearbox. Then there is the cost of the crane which is $10,000 to move it in, $10,000 to move it out, and $1,000 per hour that it operates. It appears that the crane costs are a major factor in maintaining a wind farm. Some maintenance items can be handled without a crane, but when it’s necessary to use the crane to bring down a gearbox or generator, the downtime can be significant, taking as long as 3 to 4 months depending on part availability. In some cases, it’s been necessary to have parts custom-machined to get the gearboxes repaired due to long lead times on parts. Ken tries to keep rebuilt generators and gearboxes on hand to minimize downtime in the event that one needs to be replaced. However, there are times during the winter when it’s impossible to get a crane on site and so much of the maintenance is done during the warmer months.

After our discussion in the maintenance building, we all went outside again to get a look at the turbines. I was relieved to find that the cloud ceilings had lifted and we were able to see the tops of the turbines and had more than a mile of visibility. We drove to an operating turbine and 15 people squeezed into its base to hear about how one goes about climbing up the ladder when maintenance in the nacelle is required. We also got to see the controller in the base with digital readouts of various parameters used to monitor the health of the turbine as well as its output. At the time we were there, the turbine was operating with an output of 375 kW, enough to power about 375 homes.

Then we went to look at a set of blades that were on the ground resting on some hay bales. They were awaiting some parts and a crane to reattach them to the turbine. I asked about maintenance on the blades and Ken mentioned that whenever they are taken down from the tower they are carefully inspected and any damage is repaired. They use composite repair techniques similar to the way you’d repair a composite boat or airplane. On occasion, it’s possible to repair a blade from a crane while the blade is still mounted on the tower, but when it’s on the ground, it’s much easier to work on it. A damaged blade sometimes whistles as it spins, making it possible to know in advance if a turbine has blades that may need some repair work.

We then went back to the maintenance building to ask some final questions and to warm up a bit. We also looked over some of the turbine parts, including a generator, prop cowling, slew motors, and disk brakes. The size of these parts was very impressive.

Ken then led us to the front gate where we departed back to warmer climate of Colorado. About 8 of us then gathered for lunch and had a good time discussing wind turbines and what we learned.

We really appreciated Ken’s generosity for hosting this tour and are grateful that Xcel Energy allows groups like ours to tour their facility to learn more about wind power.

Several people took some great digital photos and put them up on web sites where you can view them from these links:

Dan’s pictures

Hugh’s pictures

Scott’s pictures

Labels: energy, wind

I just wanted to make a quick announcement that I am helping to organize a tour in conjunction with the Northern Colorado Clean Energy Network of the Ponnequin Wind Farm up near the Colorado-Wyoming border for this Friday, November 30th. If you want to join us, please check out this link and follow the directions and I'll get you signed up.

Labels: energy, wind

Link

At an NCRES meeting last night the question of wind turbine efficiency came up and I was about to explain it based on my understanding of the Betz limit, but realized it was a bit too complex an issue to summarize in a few sentences, so I decided to put it in a blog article. In fact, it's even a little challenging to put in the blog, because it requires a table and the blog composing interface doesn't seem to properly display tables or the characters pi or rho for some reason. So you can find a table and a few more details here, if you're curious.

I use both the units of mph and m/s for speed since the U.S. has never bothered to convert to the metric system. For U.S. readers, an easy trick to convert from m/s to mph is to double the number and add 10%. What follows is rather technical, so if you're not interested in math, physics, or wind energy, you may just wish to skip this article.

In order to understand how much power you can generate with a wind turbine, you must first know how much energy is available in the wind. This energy is primarily determined by wind speed and the size of the wind turbine's rotor. Power generated is proportional to how much kinetic energy can be extracted per unit time.

Kinetic energy of a moving mass is defined by the equation ½ mv². We need to know the kinetic energy of the air moving across the swept area of the turbine’s rotor. Multiplying energy by its rate of movement will provide its power.

The air’s mass per unit time can be computed with the formula pAv where:

p = density of the air
A = swept area of turbine’s rotor
v = velocity of the wind

Thus combining the equations for kinetic energy and wind speed, the power available in wind comes out to:

½ pAv³

Air density (p) is about 1.2 kg/m³ at sea level and a temperature of 20 °C. This number varies depending on temperature and altitude. For example, in Colorado air density is about 1 kg/m³ or about 20% less than at sea level.

Let’s take the example of a Vestas V80 turbine with an 80 meter rotor. The amount of wind energy available in a 20 mph (9.8 m/s) wind for this turbine with 5027 m² of swept area is:

½ × 1.2 kg/m³ × 3.14 × (40 m)² × (8.9 m/s)³

= 2.3 × 10⁶ kg·m²/s³ = 2.3 MW

However, this number is the theoretical power of all the wind moving across the swept area, and you cannot completely stop the wind to get 100% of its energy. In 1920, a German physicist named Albert Betz figured out that the maximum energy that can be extracted by a wind turbine is about 59.3% of the theoretical energy present in the wind. This has become known as Betz’s Law. This means that you can only get about 1.35 MW from a 20 mph wind at sea level in the example mentioned above in the best case. Looking up the specifications for the Vestas V80 wind turbine in the graph below, we see that it generates about 950 kW in a 20 mph wind, which means it achieves about 70% of its Betz limit efficiency. This number is impressive considering there are losses at every stage of energy conversion, including the drag on the blades, the gearbox, the generator, and the transformer and losing only 30% through all these stages is quite good.

As the wind speed increases, the energy present in it goes up by the cube of its velocity. However, the maximum output of the V80 turbine stops at about 28 mph (12.5 m/s) when it reaches 2 MW. At this point, this turbine generates at about 54% of its Betz limit efficiency. From this point on, the wind turbine will not generate more than its 2 MW rated power despite the fact that the Betz limit power will climb to nearly 30 MW by the time the cutoff of the turbine is reached at 56 mph (25 m/s). Around the time of the cutoff, therefore, the turbine will be operating at 7% of its Betz limit. The turbine cuts off in high winds to protect itself from damage.

In the grand scheme of things, much of this ‘wasted’ power is mostly hypothetical since the wind speeds even at some of the best sited wind farms tend to average between 15 to 26 mph throughout the year. If the components were to be sized to handle 30 MW of power, they would be much heavier and much more expensive. So sizing the turbine for 2MW optimizes overall cost considerations over the life of the turbine.

So, how efficient is a wind turbine? The answer is that 'it depends on how you define efficiency'. In the case where you measure efficiency as the amount of energy that is theoretically available to what is actually extracted, it can look like a very small number, about 40% maximum. However, if you consider that without the wind turbine, 100% of the energy it provides would be wasted, then the answer is that it is infinitely efficient.

Labels: energy, wind

Link

I was out last week flying in the LongEZ and I decided to check the progress of the large wind farms that are under construction in Northern Colorado. One of these wind farms called Cedar Creek is right at the Wyoming-Nebraska-Colorado border and the other is farther east in Colorado, just south of Sidney, Nebraska. It is called the Peetz Table Wind farm. Between them, they have 500 wind turbines with a peak generating capacity of 700MW.

One of the things that impresses me most about wind farms is how fast they get built. These two facilities were just in the discussion stages 2 years ago. Early this spring they were just setting up the towers and now all towers are nearly complete and generating power. When I was growing up in Pennsylvania, nuclear power projects like the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station took a very long time to build, with an average build time of 12 years. By contrast these wind projects are going up in a year or less, and the amount of land available on which to build them is substantial so I would expect to see many more going up over the next few decades. Out west we also don't have nearly the number of people objecting to them with NIBMY excuses. I suppose when your closest neighbors include 220 Minuteman silos, you have a different perspective on what constitutes a "good neighbor." Some people can be very picky about what they allow in their backyards, as evidenced by Cape Wind.

My previous blog posting on Colorado wind power included an aerial shot of Colorado's Ponnequin wind farm near Cheyenne, and I now have some new photos of the new wind farms I mentioned, each which has more than 200 wind turbines.

There are also some photos of the new Vestas Blades factory which is under construction in Windsor. It will produce about 1200 40-meter wind turbine blades per year when it is completed next spring. They are even talking about expanding it to increase the rate of production by 50% within a year of commencing operation.

Labels: aviation, energy, wind

I recently read a book entitled Cape Wind by Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb. It’s a book about the struggle to get approval to build America’s first off-shore wind farm. I have been writing about wind energy lately because I think it has reached a critical mass and it is has the potential to grow to power a large part of America’s electrical grid in the next few decades. In Denmark, wind energy is already producing 20% of that country’s electricity needs.

What’s interesting about Cape Wind is that it’s become such a controversial project. You’d think that something that provides clean and renewable energy to an area of the country that desperately needs more electrical generating capacity would be anything but controversial, yet this is not the case. The controversy stems from the location for the wind farm in Nantucket Sound, which is about 5 miles off the coast of Cape Cod. For the past 6 years, this project has been held up by people who have gone to great measures to make sure it does not get built. What makes it more interesting is the reason they don’t want it to be built. Quite simply, they don’t want to have to look at it. In other words, it offends their sense of aesthetics. Stating this objection publicly would not help their cause so they are using flimsy but less embarrassing excuses such as their concern for wildlife, fisherman, pilots, and a whole host of reasons that are diversions from the real reason, that is, people feel that views from their mansions are off limits for any other societal benefit besides their own viewing pleasure. Nantucket Sound is best viewed from private beaches attached to multi-million dollar estates.

The power from the wind farm could provide up to 75% of the electrical energy needs for Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and Cape Cod. The power for this region is currently generated by a dirty oil-fired plant that has been responsible for several oil spills further down the Cape Cod coast.

The location for the proposed wind farm is ideal because it has excellent wind conditions and it is a shoal, which means it is shallow, making construction much less expensive. It’s actually too shallow to sail yachts in that location during low tide. The wind farm would only be visible from the shore for 1/2 inch above the horizon and only on clear days.

What makes the resistance to the project even more newsworthy is that it is opposed by politicians who claim to be staunch environmentalists such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Ted Kennedy, and Mitt Romney. The wind farm is supported by 84% of Massachusetts residents and yet a powerful and elite group is trying to subvert the democratic process by imposing their own will on that of the majority. Since the plant would be located in federal waters, each American should have an equal say in its approval, not just wealthy beach front property owners.

My main concern about the resistance to Cape Wind is that of setting a precedent that wind farms are something people should not want to have in their ‘back yards’. Cape Wind could be a showcase of environmental stewardship. By resisting wind energy, these people are increasing the likelihood of someone else getting a coal-burning power plant in their back yard and that’s not a behavior I want associated with fellow Americans. After all, Europeans have been building off shore wind farms for many years with great success.

People need to understand that clean and renewable energy is necessary to maintain our standard of living, protect the environment, and reduce our dependence on exhaustible fossil fuels. When you look upon a wind farm with those thoughts in mind, it connects with a much deeper sense of aesthetics than the superficiality exhibited by Cape Wind’s opponents.

Perhaps this report from Comedy Central helps add a bit of levity and puts the opposition to Cape Wind in perspective:





I sincerely hope that this project gets approved and built. Not only would it help to solve the Cape's energy shortfall, it would restore my faith in democracy. It would also help send the message that making up questionable excuses to resist the construction of renewable energy projects is a fool's errand.

You can keep abreast of this critical project at Wendy Williams's blog.

Labels: energy, wind

Link

I traveled back to Pennsylvania last week for my high school reunion. As you may have noted from some of my recent posts, I've been investigating energy, particularly renewable forms of energy. It had been three years since we'd been back in the Wyoming Valley and so I was quite astonished to see 12 large wind turbines plainly visible on top of the eastern ridge of the valley up near Bear Creek. Each 2MW Gamesa turbine provides enough electricity for about 600 homes.

I've written about wind turbines before in my blog because they started springing up in Colorado a few years ago and whenever I travel across Nebraska and Iowa in the LongEZ, I seem to find more of them each year.

I had yet to get up close to a wind turbine so Terri and I decided to take a drive up to the site. As you may know if you've ever traveled around this area of the country , the closer you get to something, the harder it is to find. In other words, you can't see the forest through the trees. We drove up Route 115 into Bear Creek and the wind turbines all but disappeared behind the mountains and trees. We continued to drive in the general direction of the turbines, and every once in a while, we'd catch a glimpse of a blade to help reorient us toward the wind farm. After driving in a circle, we eventually found the access road to the wind farm, just off Bald Mountain Road. We saw a lot of no trespassing signs, but felt it wouldn't hurt to go up to the maintenance office to see if we could get permission to drive up to the first tower. I found a friendly engineer there and we began to chat and he said we could drive up to the first tower and take a look around. I was most interested to hear one of these wind turbines from up close.



We were able to get quite close to the turbines and found that the noise they made was hardly noticeable and certainly not objectionable. I asked the engineer why there is controversy when it comes to wind turbines and he felt that people have been conditioned by those who have a vested interest in non-renewable forms of energy attacking them for various reasons that border on being ridiculous. For example, a common objective I hear is that wind turbines kill birds. More than 100 million birds are killed each year flying into windows in the U.S. alone, yet you don't see anyone trying to ban windows. A similar number are killed by house cats and cars. Wind turbines kill only 1 or 2 birds per turbine per year. Even with the thousands of wind turbines deployed and planned, this number will always be at least 3 orders of magnitude less than the other causes I listed, and so bringing up one's concern for the well being of birds is a rather odd objection.

Opponents also say that wind turbines kill bats, which eat mosquitoes, that may carry West Nile virus. Again, I think this is really reaching by people who are unaware of the benefits of renewable energy and afraid of any unlikely downside potential, such as lowered property values. I've also heard of people fearful that wind turbines cause audible noise but I can attest from my own experience that the noise was not very noticeable. I'd gladly trade wind turbine noise for the noise that comes from the highway 1/4 mile from my house.

I can understand the people who live a few hundred feet from a wind farm being concerned about noise, but I grew up less than 300 yards from a working coal breaker that operated 24 x 7 and it made quite a racket, yet I never knew of anyone complaining about it. It also released plenty of coal dust into the local environment as well as the final product which has significant environmental hazards. So maybe I have a different perspective on environmental noise and pollution than someone who has built a house on a mountaintop.

On the way back down the access road, we came across a large flock of wild turkeys crossing the road which you can see in the picture below. Click on it for a better image of the turkeys.



Later in the week, we traveled up to Scranton and saw the Waymart Wind Farm which has 43 GE 1.5MW turbines.

I think that wind farms along the ridges of Pennsylvania will become a more common sight as time goes on. People should not consider wind turbines as eyesores, but rather see them as examples of majestic beauty that benefit all of society.

I believe people will come to understand we need to eliminate our dependence on exhaustible fuels to provide our electricity. There is no argument that we will run out of them eventually. At some point people will realize that when they turn on a light, a TV, or computer, the energy may be coming from a silent wind turbine spinning in the distance powered by a clean and inexhaustible energy source.

Labels: energy, wind

About 5 years ago wind farms started popping up in Colorado. They are easy to spot from the air and can be seen for many miles because the structures are so enormous. A modern wind turbine can reach well over 400 feet into the air.

Over a span of less than 3 decades wind turbines have increased from an average rotor size of 10 meters generating 25KW to a rotor size of 112 meters generating up to 6 MW per turbine. The 3+ MW turbines are generally installed in the ocean about 5-10 miles off shore where the wind is steady. Land based wind turbines are generally rated at less than 2 MW. Each 1 MW of wind energy is enough power for approximately 300 households based on an average U.S. household consumption rate of around 900 kWh per month. The average power available from wind turbines, also called their 'capacity factor', is about 1/3 of their rated generating capacity because the wind is not constant. They make their rated power in winds about 20-25 mph and will not generate any more than the rated power even when the wind increases above that speed because it would over stress the system. Above about 55-60 mph, the wind turbine will protect itself by locking its rotor so that the blades will not get damaged.

Here in Colorado there are many locations where the wind is nearly always blowing on the plains and there aren't any obstructions on the ground to slow it down. Other than the trees along the Platte river, there is virtually no vegetation taller than a cornstalk between here and Nebraska. And Wyoming has even higher wind and fewer trees than Colorado in the eastern side of the state.

I was out flying today and took a few photos of the Ponnequin Wind Farm up near the border of Wyoming to take a look at Colorado's first wind farm which was built about 6 years ago. You can see a photo of it below.




If you're curious about the Ponnequin wind farm you can read a little about it here at the American Wind Energy Association website. If you have Google Earth, you can get a satellite view of it here. Or here on Google Maps.

About 60 miles east of the Ponnequin Wind Farm, the largest wind farm in Colorado called Cedar Creek is currently under construction. During the past few months I've been monitoring the progress of it since it's not far from Greeley, at least not as the crow (or LongEZ) flies, and I'm astonished at how fast it's getting built. A few months ago, there were only a few towers standing and now they have more than 200+ towers erected. I timed how long it took me to fly from one end to the other and it was 5 minutes, flying at 160 miles an hour which means it stretches 13 miles from east to west. It's on land that previously didn't have much use due to sparse population and lack of water for irrigation. I did some quick calculations and realized that this wind farm will generate more than $80M/year in electricity from its 273 wind turbines, based on the average of around $.10/KWh currently paid in the U.S. by consumers. That's not a bad return since the fuel, a major cost for conventional power plants, is free in the case of wind power.


Looking down from above on these structures, it's hard to fathom how big they are. In the picture above, the closest wind turbine has a large truck parked near its base which is virtually invisible in the photo. That gives you an approximate idea of the scale of these structures. Go ahead and click on that image to get a higher resolution photo of it and a better idea of the relative size of the truck and the wind turbine.

One of the biggest logistical issues with constructing these wind farms is getting the materials to the site. The tower sections take up most of the highway when transported and are nearly 60 feet long per section. It takes 3 of them to make up the tower. Similarly, the rotor blades are enormous, over 100 feet in length. Can you imagine trying to get that to go around a corner?

Vestas Wind Systems of Denmark is currently building a turbine blade plant in Windsor, CO, just about 10 miles from where I live. This will better accommodate the delivery of large turbine blades to wind farm sites in the western U.S.

In talking with a rancher in Wyoming recently, it appears that a lot of site surveys have been underway over the years to construct wind farms there, turning what was very marginal land into a valuable resource to provide clean, renewable energy for future generations. Even though the Cedar Creek site seems expansive, and it is, there is so much land in eastern Colorado and Wyoming that would be ideal for wind farms that it's easy to imagine building them for the next 20 or 30 years. That's about the average life expectancy of the wind generating equipment, so after they've done that, they will get to do it over again.

Labels: energy, wind

I've been writing a little about energy lately and have a few more blog postings related to the topic but I found this clever commercial on YouTube that I thought warranted its own posting.

Labels: energy, wind