Alternative to copper ground lower in cost

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Excerpt: GroundSmart Copper Clad Steel is an alternative to solid and stranded copper. It’s an electrical conductor that has an outer sleeve of copper metallurgically bonded to a solid steel core. It is cost efficient and has anti-theft characteristics. Copper clad steel provides a safe, reliable alter …

Trends in turbine brakes

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Excerpt: Brakes in a wind turbine perform several jobs. They hold blade pitch steady and keep the nacelle pointing in the right direction. Also, that one big disc brake – up to now on the gearbox’s high-speed output shaft to control over over-speed –had better hold everything still when violent storms …

Floating turbine platform ready to tap the 2 TW offshore potential

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Excerpt: Foundations are a big part of land-based turbines and more so for those headed offshore. A solution to the tricky foundation problems is to omit them – let the turbines float. So far, only one turbine floats. It’s on a 100-m spar in Norwegian waters. Principle Power (principlepowerinc.com) has a …

Turbine of the Month: Strong, Smart, and Safe

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Excerpt: As locations with higher wind speeds become saturated, the wind power industry has begun developing areas with lower, yet useful, wind. Turbine manufacturer Suzlon supports this idea and suggests its latest generation S9X  2.1-MW machine to meet the demand. The S9X, an evolution of the S88, operate …

Prepping your wind farm for condition monitoring

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Excerpt:     David Clark Wind Consultant El Dorado Hills, Calif. Here’s a little secret: You can probably use anyone’s condition monitoring on a single turbine and get data good enough to predict basic failures. But expand the monitoring scope to several turbines or multiple site …

Trends in bearings

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Excerpt: Probably the most significant accomplishment in the bearing industry over the last ten years is the better understanding of what happens to bearings in wind turbines. Researchers and OEMs have defined their loading, vibration, temperature extremes, and identified a few peculiar hazards such as stray …

Six trends shaping future turbine designs

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Excerpt: A California-based consulting firm recently conducted a study of the U.S. patent landscape for wind turbines to determine which technological trends have emerged and what might be in store for the future of wind-turbine technology. The study, from Totaro & Associates (www.totaro-associates.c …

Trends in Wind Power Operations & Maintenance

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Excerpt: Wind turbines aren’t yet as reliable or cost effective as the industry would like them to be. What’s more, most turbines are so new, their maintenance costs are an unknown figure. According to research from UK-based Wind Energy Update, 79% of today’s fleet are still under manufacturer warranty …

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Excerpt: Michael Schratz Dialight Corp. www.dialight.com AWEA recently reported that, despite significant challenges in 2010, the U.S. wind-power industry made significant progress on its promise to strengthen America's position with an increased supply of renewable energy. The organization says all sig …

Current industry weak but outlook strong

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Excerpt: Taylor Johnson RES Advocate Each spring the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) releases their annual wind-energy report outlining the state of the industry for the prior year. This past year was the first that’s seen declining growth since 2007. But, as the report points out, we still hav …