Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 12
Hikaru
Matsumiya
HIKARUWIND Lab. Ltd., Japan.
Small wind turbines (SWTs) have various long history and yet huge market potential
globally. Looking back last a couple of decades, various SWTs, both horizontal-axis
and vertical-axis types, have emerged, however, they have kept standing behind
in the shadows of large-scale wind turbines, as if they could not play meaningful
roles in energy production. Small turbines may be easily designed, manufactured,
tested and operated. But somehow mostly their unit costs are not only much higher
but also reliabilities are much lower when compared with those of middle to large
turbines. The truth lays in technical diffi culty with SWTs. Low Reynolds number
is one of the problems. Today, various new technical approaches have revealed
problems to be solved in delivering advanced SWTs to global markets with lower
cost and higher reliability.
1 Introduction
For a long time it had been thought that large wind turbines (LWTs) are global,
while small wind turbines (SWTs) are local. Actually the style of use of SWTs
is local, but all of the problems, both technical and institutional, that SWTs have
today are mostly global. This turned out during the IEA Annex XI's Topical Expert
Meeting on “Challenges of Introducing Reliable Small Wind Turbines” in Stockholm
in September 2006. What was common consensus among the experts, engineers
and researchers are generally high cost and low reliability with SWTs in general.
SWTs could provide us more general values in electricity or in other forms. This
was the main conclusion at the expert meeting, because all of the participants had
already understood that advanced technologies were coming up.
In this chapter, attentions are mainly focused on new technologies and their
applications to SWTs, while there are plenty of types and intelligent applications
that have already come in the markets.
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