Onshore wind
Silent wind power revolution
Energy expert Bernard Chabot takes a look at the latest data for low and medium wind velocities and finds that Germany could have a large share of wind power from turbines in areas without great wind resources and even raise the capacity factor of turbines in the process.
This article is available as a PDF. (Craig Morris)
Mr Chabot-could the same model used for low wind wind turbine and sites,be -tweaked for very small (2Kw-5Kw)turbines spread over less than optimal sites?I've often suspected that the grid connected relability,availabbility and output of such arrays is usually deliberatly underestimated.For instance,in some canadian power companies logging-small wind and solar panel tie ins are apparently responsible for the wires being down!Grid outages are not deducted from these sources available outputs.Thus the actual availability from these sources seems lower than it is-with sample snipping,this can seem larger than it is.
I bow to your data on the low peaking losses for optimised turbines on low-wind sites. It certainly looks, from the very low current mean capacity factor (17.5%), as if a lot of old turbines were installed in such sites in inland Germany that were very far from optimised.
James, thanks for the reference to Jane Austen’s heroines :-) , but I don’t agree on your comment about capacity factor being “fetishised”. For IEC3A conditions and a Rayleigh distribution, even at 7.5 m/s average wind speed, the part of annual wind kinetic energy beyond 25 m/s (the current cut-off wind speed for IEC3A wind turbine) is only 0.38 % of the annual total of 4852 kWh/m2, so those new wind turbines are very well optimized in terms of annual energy production. For strategic advantages of the related high capacity factors, please refer to the end of the first article on this topic downloadable at :http://www.renewablesinternational.net/turbines-in-low-wind-areas/150/505/62498/ and also to Mr. Willenbacher’s comments at: http://www.renewablesinternational.net/german-businessman-to-give-away-fortune-for-100-percent-renewables/150/537/68284/
``Sensibility´´ (which is what Jane Austen´s heroines have) should be ``sensitivity´´. Capacity factors should not be fetishised. The new light-wind turbines get a high one by throwing away a lot of peak wind power. It´s an exercise in economic optimisation, not the pursuit of a single technical goal. The market seems to be telling wind operatora that the mean is more important than the peak. It we ever have cheap large-scale storage, peak output will become nore valuable.