Plate-rolls that nature will appreciate

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Excerpt: French company Alstom has confirmed an order to provide plate-roll manufacturer Davi with a new, high capacity, four- roll plate roll to build new plants. The companies say the plate rolls are safer and have no environmental impact. “We have been the first and only one, to engineer a four- …

Trends in utility scale wind turbines

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Excerpt: If money were less of an object, developers would always put the largest turbines on the tallest towers possible. That would ensure the highest possible capacity factors from about 5-MW units and give a significant boost to power production. It would also, however, be costly. To find the right m …

Lidar you can leave alone

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Excerpt: UK-based Natural Power has combined its product innovation business (ZephIR) with remote power specialists Ampair to offer a managed wind data and power service. Despite the low power requirements of a modern lidar system such as ZephIR, a reliable and easily transported power supply is still import …

A certified data logger for the wind market

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Excerpt: A manufacturer of data loggers offers a model that prevents any data manipulation. Ammonit says its Meteo-40 meets the high standards of MEASNET site assessments and is the first data logger on the market that offers data certification. Meteo-40 can be used for wind site assessment, wind farm mo …

Trends offshore

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Excerpt: The offshore wind-industry trends are just taking shape, but they seem to center around the turbines, their foundations, and the equipment and vessels needed to place them. That an offshore industry is testament to the persistence of Cape Wind developers (10 years of persistence) and finally, an acc …

Trends in transportation and logistics

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Excerpt: The problem with moving wind-turbine components is their size–they are gigantic. Nacelles can measure 12-ft wide and over 20-ft long, while half of a tower can be 12-ft wide and almost 150-ft long. And blades –conversation stoppers on most highways– easily span 100 ft. Moving these str …

Plenty of room for wind power as gov expands tall-grass area

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Excerpt: Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s plan to double the size of the “Tallgrass Heartland” area in the Flint Hills. A voluntary agreement recently worked out with landowners, power companies, and preservationists protects the area from future wind farm development by holding almost 11,000 mi2 of …

Kansas utility to add 200 MW from wind

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Excerpt: Kansas City Power & Light is blowing up its wind power portfolio by more than 65% by agreeing to buy power from a project slated for Western Kansas. The Kansas City-based electric utility signed a power purchase agreement for about 131 MW from the CPV Renewable Energy Co. LLC wind f …

Trend in towers

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Excerpt: Towers for wind turbines have done a good a job hiding their high-tech origins. For instance, their sections–humbly called cans–are rolled from flat-sheet steel into precise, yet slightly tapered cones and then welded by CNC machines. More CNC machine tools drill holes and attach flanges that al …

Where the winds are – in Kansas

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Excerpt: The Department of Energy's Wind Program and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has published a wind resource map for the state of Kansas showing a predicted mean annual wind speeds at 80-m up. It’s presented with a spatial resolution of about 2 km (interpolated to a finer …