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still feasible. Taking into account the known yield rates, this would
lead to approximately three megawatts output, he calculated. He
said this dimension should be interesting for the power industry.
“What, so little?” The response of the officer showed the real
dilemma between what was technically feasible and what was
politically desired. While wind power use so far had experiences
only up to a scale of 100 kW, politicians and power providers
thought only in terms of hundreds and thousands of megawatts for
the national economy.
Although the visions had been very diferent, this meeting gave
birth to GROWIAN, an acronym for the German words for giant wind
power station which was to be the core project of state-subsidised
wind energy research in Germany after the oil price crisis. However
this birth took place under an unlucky star as the figures went to the
press the next day, where as Dörner says they were “cemented”. So
the dimensions of GROWIAN were defined
.
Hütter had been fully convinced that rotor blades could be
produced on this scale by composite construction but he had to
face a lot of critical responses to this proposal. He openly said that
further research was needed before trying to technically realise
these dimensions. He down-scaled his proposal within the program
study “Energy sources for tomorrow? Non-fossil-non-nuclear
primary energy sources” financed by BMFT. Under this study which,
and this is quite savoury, had a question mark in the title—his team
at the University of Stuttgart and at the DFVLR tackled Part III,
wind energy.
With this study, Hütter's team estimated the potentials of wind
energy in Germany and analysed the economic profitability as well
as defined a draft concept for development of a large wind turbine
essentially based on Hütter's experience with W-34. In the first
step, the team proposed the development of a wind turbine with
80 m rotor diameter and approximately 1 MW output, and building
on the experience with this design, to move forward to bigger
systems later on.
The BMFT did not want to hear about this. Even if this program
study served as a guideline for the development of new energy
technologies, and as the foundation of the research programs of
the coming years, the officials in Bonn did not want to back up the
intended dimension of the prototype. At the one hand, this giant
leap was considered the only way to create business interest in
a priori
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