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- Category: Articles
Utilising Energy Storage
Coupling an energy storage facility with a wind farm can improve that wind farm’s interaction with the power grid. This can be crucial, as recent estimates put the cost of integrating wind energy into the grid at 5 to 30% of the cost of generation. Energy storage can benefit wind power in many ways, including providing a balancing function for a rapidly changing load and wind output, smoothing the ramp rates so the power flows are more gradual, and providing reliable, firm output from the wind farm at any time. Sizing and choosing the correct storage technology and operational profile depends upon a number of factors – one size does not fit all.By Richard Baxter, Senior Technology Analyst, Ardour Capital Investments, USA
- Category: Articles
Drilling Monopiles for Offshore Wind Turbines
Foundation equipment manufacturer BAUER Maschinen GmbH, a member of the BAUER Group of Germany, was awarded the contract for supplying its Flydrill System BFD 5500 to Marine Projects International Ltd (MPI), together with full technical supervision and operational support for the installation of monopile foundations for the Barrow Offshore Wind Farm site in the East Irish Sea. In this article, the authors describe the system and project.By Manfred G. Beyer and Wolfgang G. Brunner, BAUER Maschinen GmbH, Germany
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- Category: Articles
Preliminary Results from New Modelling Study
Optimising the layout of an offshore wind farm is an iterative process, and adds expense to wind farm development. The Offshore Wind Farm Layout Optimization (OWFLO) project seeks to streamline this process by uniting efficient optimisation algorithms with models of offshore farm costs and energy production. Most software configures farms for maximum energy production, but this does not account for the significant, site-specific costs of components such as the support structure and electrical interconnection. The OWFLO software instead models the levelised production cost to identify the combination of maximum energy production and minimum cost of energy that best suits the site. This article summarises the initial scope and progress of this project and presents a comparison with data from an actual offshore wind farm. The overall energy and cost of energy estimations compare well with the real data, and methods for further improvement of the models are described.
By Christopher Elkinton, James Manwell and Jon McGowan, University of Massachusetts, USA
- Category: Articles
The Impact on Navigation of an Offshore Wind Farm
Economic and social use of the sea has been fundamental in human history. Offshore wind farms are the most recent development and are a major change to the marine environment. They need to safely share the sea with many other users.By Michael Starling, BMT Renewables Limited (a subsidiary of BMT Limited), UK
- Category: Articles
Storage for Large-Scale Wind Power
The world’s wind resources are huge. But as wind becomes a larger fraction of electricity generation, grid integration must be resolved, particularly to smooth fluctuations in wind power output. Adding energy storage or back-up has been proposed as a solution, but dedicated storage or back-up adds capital cost to wind power. This article proposes vehicle-to-grid power (V2G) as a storage resource for large-scale wind power. By Willett Kempton and Amardeep Dhanju, University of Delaware, USA
- Category: Articles
Soil Investigations for Offshore Wind Turbine Projects
On several occasions, the soil conditions have proved to be a key area for offshore wind farm projects; often this can result in disputes between the various parties involved over responsibilities. Despite the soil investigation being the owner’s responsibility, this responsibility is often delegated to a subcontractor. The importance of a thorough and well-performed soil investigation cannot be understated for the design of offshore support structures. A good and well-documented design basis that includes adequate geotechnical information will facilitate ‘fast-track’ project development and a project of high quality with only minor variation orders to the contract; on the other hand, a poorly carried out soil investigation can open up the project to delays and major variation orders, or a conservative and costly design. By Tove Feld, DNV Global Wind Energy, Denmark
- Category: Articles
A Program for Wind Turbine Design
Motivated by the growing installation of wind energy systems all over the world and with the perspective of wind energy utilisation in Brazil, the authors present a simplified model to evaluate the optimum aerodynamic configuration for the rotor blades of a horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT). The model is based on the conservation equations and the Panel Method, and a limited set of geometric parameters that strongly affect the rotor aerodynamics are calculated. By Daniel Fonseca de Carvalho e Silva, Luiz Henrique Gomes Pereira and Gustavo C.R. Bodstein, Brazil
