wind turbines

GE recently celebrated its 20,000th wind turbine installation with its 10-year anniversary in the wind industry. Altogether, GE’s 20,000-turbine fleet has the capacity to power the cities of Hong Kong and London for an entire year. “We couldn’t have achieved this milestone without our development partners,” said Vic Abate, vice president of renewable energy for…

One of the most prominent trends in the wind construction sector is moving toward low-cost providers without giving up experience. Also, with the experience many companies now have, each is developing its own approach to constructing quality farms faster. It’s no surprise that specialized software assists with this task. Lastly, the greatest challenge facing the…

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. This is about to change. The huge…

Of all the mechanical maintenance problems in wind turbines, shaft alignments are probably easiest to understand. The high-speed shaft between a gearbox and generator is a critical point of failure. Their misalignment a leading cause. Precision-shaft alignments involve aligning the center line of the shafts of one or more rotating machines. When the shaft center…

Conventional turbines are perched 60 to 80-m off the ground where the wind is stronger. But what about the wind below those elevations? California-based Wind Harvest International says it has a solution in a straight-bladed, vertical-axis wind turbine that offers the first cost-effective solution to harvesting high energy, turbulent near-ground winds. “Using a methodical approach…

The manufacturer of IBEX 1000 Climb Assists will supply 66 of them for new wind turbines in Glenrock, Wyoming. The Climb assists will be installed in the GE 1.5-MW wind turbines being constructed at the Top of the World project near Casper, Wyoming for its owners and operators. The patented IBEX Climb Assist puts control…

The concept of “Build your own turbine,”  in which customers can “design” their own, comes from an independent engineering company involved in designing electrical systems for wind turbines. AMSC Windtec, a subsidiary of U.S-based American Superconductor, designs a variety of megawatt-class wind turbines for both onshore and offshore.  AMSC Windtec then licenses those designs to…

Community-wind developers often encounter some opposition when developing projects. It may surface as misinformed, for example, insisting that the turbines kill birds and wind farms depress land values, among other things. They are not true but the charges deserve more detailed explanations to effectively dispel them. Hence, this column and others to follow will deal…