Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
7 Trends in wind turbine developments
and wind power generation
Wind turbine technology has been developed by continuously optimizing turbine
design, improving turbine performance, and enhancing overall turbine effi ciency.
There have been several generations of development and improvement in wind
turbine technology, concentrated on blades, generators, direct drive techniques,
pitch and yaw control systems, and so on. To provide more electrical energy from
wind technology in the next several decades, it requires
￿
Developing innovative techniques
￿
Decreasing wind turbine costs through technology advancement
￿
Optimizing manufacturing processes and enhancing manufacturing operations
￿
Improving wind turbine performance and effi ciency
￿
Reducing operating and maintenance costs
￿
Expanding wind turbine production capacities
The current major trends in the development of wind turbines are towards higher
power, higher effi ciency and reliability, and lower cost per kilowatt machines.
7.1 High-power, large-capacity wind turbine
One of the signifi cant developments in wind turbine designing and manufactur-
ing in recent years is the increase in the wind turbine capacity of individual wind
turbines. From machines of just 25 kW two decades ago, the commercial range
of modern wind turbines sold today is typically 1-6 MW. At the same time, 7-10
MW wind turbines are underway in some larger wind turbine OEMs. With this
trend, innovative techniques have been developed and new materials have been
adopted for optimizing the wind turbine performance and minimizing the opera-
tion and manufacturing costs. Enercon has installed the present world's largest
wind turbine E-126 in Germany and is in the process of installing more units in
Belgium. The E-126 turbine is rated at 6 MW with the rotor diameter of 126 m
[83]. Clipper Windpower has announced that it is planning to build a 7.5 MW
offshore wind turbine [84].
However, while high-powered wind turbines enable to increase wind power out-
put per unit and lower the cost per kWh, there are some signifi cant challenges
facing wind turbine engineers:
a.
Failure rates of wind turbines depend not only on turbines' operational age but
also their rated power. High-power, large-size wind turbines have shown sig-
nifi cant higher annual failure rates due to the primary failures of the control
system, drivetrain, and electronic/electrical components. Because most of
mega-watt wind turbines were usually among the fi rst models installed, they
show high early failure rates that decrease slightly throughout their years of
operation [ 85 ].
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