Wind turbine development moving on from pursuit of size
Thursday 22 January 2009
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| It could be dawn on a new era for the wind industry, with a move away from ever-bigger turbines towards designing systems more specific to deployment sites, industry experts suggested on Tuesday |
The development of wind turbines is going through a "significant change", according to experts speaking at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday.
No longer are wind turbine manufacturers striving only to make bigger and bigger turbines to generate more power from the wind.
According to Andrew Garrad, chairman of consultancy Garrad Hassan, the wind industry is now pursuing "better and better" wind turbines - and diversifying to produce different wind turbines to cope with more specific site characteristics.
Mr Garrad, whose company claims responsibility for technical due diligence work with more than 20% of the world's current installed wind energy capacity, said: "The mantra to date has been 'bigger and bigger' - but now it's changed, and the mantra is now 'better and better'.
"I think 'bigger and bigger' will continue, but 'better and better' comes first."
During his speech, Mr Garrad pointed out that modern wind turbines might all look similar on the outside, but on the inside there were very different, with each of the manufacturers pursuing their own technologies.
While avoiding any comment over which designs were the best, he said: "The important thing now is looking for different turbines for different sites and different types of condition."
Speaking on the day the USA gained a new President with a stated priority for developing greener energy, Mr Garrad said Europe was now likely to lose its position as the prime market for wind turbines to North America and Asia.
He said China in particular was now developing several wind energy parks of the order of 3.8GW to 5GW in size - each park with the combined capacity of installed wind energy in Britain and France.
However, with the global financial slow-down, Mr Garrad suggested that the wind energy industry was now moving away from being a "seller's market".
Costs
Other speakers at the wind energy seminar suggested that the wind industry must now go through a period of industrialisation to realise its global potential.
The industry now is quite good at predicting power from the wind, therefore wind energy can be scheduled.
Frank Mastiaux, chief executive of E.ON Climate and Renewables, said: "The wind industry must move from boutique to truly industrial levels of output. To build 300,000 new wind turbines by 2020, one would have to be erected every 25 minutes."
The need to bring technology costs down was raised by speakers including Siemens' renewable energy division chief executive Dr Rene Umlauft, who pointed out that steel costs had already come down since last year.
Mr Mastiaux that developing more easily replicable construction methods might bring "significant economies of scale". With operations and maintenance accounting for around 20% of the overall costs of a wind farm, he added that reliability would be an important part of bringing down overall life cycle costs.
Vestas chief executive Ditlev Engel said improving wind turbine reliability was a particular focus of his company, the world's biggest turbine manufacturers.
He said: "Failure is not an option and this is the mission on to which we are conducting our business - to make sure the reliability is undisputed."
Grid
Meanwhile, Mr Garrad said the key for any country in achieving a high penetration of wind energy into its energy market would be investing in grid infrastructure.
But, he insisted that wind power now should not be seen as "intermittent", that industry wind forecasting is now good enough for wind power to be scheduled into electricity transmission systems.
"Yes, wind energy is variable," he said, "but wind energy is certainly not random, it is predictable.
"Wind power is not intermittent. The industry now is quite good at predicting power from the wind, therefore wind energy can be scheduled, adding value to production."
Offshore
Siemens has said there is 70GW worth of business in European offshore wind alone
Mr Garrad claimed that though projects would be interesting from an engineering point of view, offshore wind would only reach 10% of the wind industry's annual turnover in future.
However, Siemens' chief Dr Umlauft said his company saw the European market alone for offshore wind at 70GW, pointing out that despite the engineering challenges of building larger wind farms further out to sea, there were some strong advantages in the offshore field.
These including a better wind resource and less "nimby" opposition, "particularly in Europe". Larger turbines were more easily transported via ship than on land, he added.
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