Installation Cost For Wind Power' title='Installation Cost For Wind Power' />Advancements in Wind Turbine Technology Improving Efficiency and Reducing Cost. By Justin Martino, Associate Editor. Wind power capacity has increased dramatically in the U. A concise guide to using renewable wind energy for electricity generation. Rooftop vawt wind turbines for battery charging, grid connection and more We sell, install and maintain rooftop mounted wind energy converters for power generation. NREL is a national laboratory of the U. S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency Renewable Energy Operated by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC. Wind power capacity has increased dramatically in the U. S. recently and accompanying that, the turbines that produce it have become more powerful, more efficient. Installation Cost For Wind Power' title='Installation Cost For Wind Power' />S. If you go back 1. Keith Longtin, wind products general manager at General Electric. Those differences come in many different areas rotors, controls, electronics and gearboxes but the advancing technology used in wind power production have always aimed for the same goal making wind power a better choice for power generation. Capacity Factor. While a previous focus of the industry was increasing the total nameplate capacity of wind turbines, the focus has shifted to the capacity factor of the turbine, which helps keeps energy cost low by providing the most possible power. Native AdvertisementThat is really the direction were going, Longtin said. If you go back 1. Today, its over 5. As weve improved the capacity factors and improved the cost of energy, that enables us to go into more and more locations where the wind is lower. One of the deciding forces so far for increasing capacity factors has been an increase in the size of the rotors used on wind turbines. Longtin said GEs predominant turbine in the U. S., which has a 1. MW capacity, currently comes with a 1. Increasing the size of the turbine rotors creates new challenges for manufacturers, however. Cost of a bergey system. A typical 10 kW Bergey GridTek home wind energy system will cost 40,000 60,000 to install, depending on the tower option and various. Longtin said rotors scale poorly with size, so the cost can go up faster than the revenue generated by the increased capacity factor. How A Front Wheel Drive Manual Transmission Works Cold here. Turbine rotors are affected by two different forces torque, which turns the rotors and creates energy, and thrust, which pushes against the turbine. Dealing with thrust can be difficult when designing a rotor. The thrust is equivalent to five F 1. Longtin said. There are tremendous loads of forces up there, and so it goes to great engineering technology to be able to create these very reliable turbines. Breakthroughs on turbine controls led to being able to handle the additional thrust generated by wind, Longtin said. He compared the controls used on turbines to anti lock braking systems on cars, saying the way the turbine is controlled and shut down, along with how it responds to wind gusts, allows for a bigger rotor on a turbine. Alstom has made similar changes in the size of rotors for its platforms. The company took its eco. MW turbine with a 1. Last year, the company increased that to a 1. We were able to increase by nearly 4. Albert Fisas Camanes, Director of Innovation for Alstom Wind North America. That lets us deliver a more efficient wind turbine to our customers. When you increase the area of the rotor, you are able to get more energy at lower wind speed. Reliability. While the focus on increasing the power produced from wind turbines may be on the capacity factor, another way is to make sure wind turbines are operational and available. Longtin said GE has made major strides int hat area in the past 1. The availability of wind turbines 1. And the wind industry was OK with that because before that they were available 7. We took a power generation mindset to it and said 9. Thats what gas turbines run at, thats what nuclear plants run at, thats what steam turbines run at, so thats what were going to do. Weve made lots of investments to improve the overall availability of a wind turbine so that today we have 2. To help achieve that sort of industry reliability and to continue improving on it Longtin said the company has worked to improve the individual components used in turbines, both electronics and gearboxes. For gearboxes, GE has combined the manufacturing processes and design processes so theyre designing components that can be reliably manufactured. In addition, the company does highly accelerated lifetime testing on all its gearbox designs to validate the design on all new gearboxes. Longtin said the company is looking at the manufacturing of the parts used in the gearbox. GE is looking at ways to harden gears as well as different types of bearings and bearings configuration. Gearbox reliability is something were incredibly focused on, he said. Theres a lot of work that goes into trying to maximize that reliability. In the future, Longtin said the company will also focus on how to minimize the downtime when a gearbox does have a mechanical failure. Were trying to make our gearboxes so if a problem occurs, were able to service that uptower as opposed to bring a crane in and replace the whole thing, he said. That is probably one of the best things we can do. Challenges in Offshore Production. While the onshore wind turbine industry is going strong, the U. S. is looking toward the possibility of adding offshore wind capacity in the future. Alstom recently signed a contract with Deepwater Wind to supply turbines for the 3. MW Block Island Wind Farm three miles off the coat of Rhode Island, and the company is also part of Dominion Virginia Powers Virginia Offshore Wind Technology Advancement Project, which was one of seven picked by the U. S. Department of Energys advanced technology demonstration projects. The needs of offshore wind production require different solutions than onshore, Fisas Camanes said. From the Alstom perspective, we see two different worlds, he said. Onshore has some contraints, and they are not the same constraints you are going to see in an offshore site. We are treating them as two different animals, and we are using different technologies for those two applications. The use of different technologies for onshore and offshore wind power projects is another change that has occurred over the past 1. While companies used to take the same wind turbine used on land and installed it offshore, but Fisas Camanes said Alstom took a different approach with its current generation of offshore wind turbines. If you look at the new generation of offshore wind turbines, our wind turbine, the Haliade 1. This has driven different aspects of the design of the wind turbine, with one of the main decisions being using direct drive technology. The Haliade 1. MW turbine that uses a 1. Fisas Camanes said the company plans to continue developing and investing in the improvement of the direct drive solution for its offshore wind turbines, including improving its efficiency and weight. Companies are also looking at the use of floating wind turbines, which use floating structures instead of requiring wind towers be set into a foundation under water. Ten years ago, it was hard to imagine floating wind turbines, and this is real now, Fisas Camanes said. Were in a demonstration phase right now, and Im expecting to see the development of floating wind farms in the next 1. Tools to Improve Efficiency. As companies look to make more sophisticated wind turbine technology, more sophisticated tools are required. One of those is 3. D modeling technology, which allows companies to use computer simulations to see how products will respond before manufacturing and testing the product in the field. Maybe five or 1. Ahmad Haidari of ANSYS, a company that produces simulation software. Imagine having all that on the computer, where you can change the angle of the attack, change the velocity and change the yaw angle. Computer simulation can be useful to companies as they look to increase the capacity factor of turbines.