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Siemens Launches Permanent Magnet-Based Gearless Wind Turbine
Progress in the development of commercially-viable direct drive wind turbines took a significant step forward last week, with the official launch by Siemens Energy of its SWT-3.0-101 wind turbine. This turbine has a faceplate rating of 3 MW, has no gearbox and uses a permanent magnet generator to produce electricity. What’s really interesting about this system [...]
Continue reading...New Permanent Magnet Direct Drive Generator Concept For Wind Turbines Unveiled
22. November 2009
[Updated: 03/09/10 & 11/23/09.] The Times Online has just published a story on a technology that apparently “has the potential to revolutionise the renewable energy industry by making wind power cheaper and more reliable and greatly increasing the efficiency of wind turbines for electricity companies.” The driver behind the work, conducted by Dr Markus Mueller [...]
Continue reading...The Problems Of Sourcing Wind Turbines And Rare Earth Metals From China
12. November 2009
Last weekend, Democrat US Senator Chuck Schumer of NY made headlines with his comments on a recent plan to fund a wind farm in Texas, using Federal stimulus money to pay for Chinese-built wind turbines. Rare metals commentator and analyst Jack Lifton has posted a new article on the subject, called “The Rare Earth Crisis [...]
Continue reading...Wind Turbines – Up Close And Personal
12. October 2009
Last week I was in Denmark, and while there I had an opportunity to pay a visit to some wind turbines operated by Aalborg University in Northern Denmark. Getting to finally see and hear a fully functional 2.3 MW wind turbine “in the flesh” was pretty cool, I have to say. There was a reasonable [...]
Continue reading...The Windbelt: A New Non-Turbine-Based Wind Energy Generator
23. September 2009
Earlier this week I came across a rather interesting new technology from Humdinger Wind Energy, LLC. Based in Honolulu, this company claims that “from enabling smart buildings to reducing the cost of wind energy”, they are “researching & developing the world’s first non-turbine harvesting technology, the Windbelt™ generator”. Wind power without a wind turbine? Definitely [...]
Continue reading...10 MW And Beyond: Are Superconductors The Future Of Wind Energy?
7. August 2009
The demand for electricity generated by wind turbines grows each year, with legions of engineers working frantically to implement new technology. In this article we will look at the “bleeding edge” of generator design: the emerging use of superconducting materials to produce direct drive generators that are in theory capable of generating 10 MW of [...]
Continue reading...How Does The Use Of Permanent Magnets Make Wind Turbines More Reliable?
3. August 2009
For all of its soaring elegance, it is easy to forget just how complex a machine the modern-day commercial-scale wind turbine really is. In this article I will focus on the massive, highly engineered electromechanical system sitting at the top of every wind turbine tower. We’ll explore how the use of permanent magnets in the [...]
Continue reading...Why Are Wind Turbines Getting Bigger?
1. August 2009
No-one following the growth of the wind turbine industry over the last two decades will have failed to have noticed the trend towards larger and taller turbines. While this might seem to just be the natural order of things [after all, "bigger is better", right?] – it might be a useful exercise to pause [...]
Continue reading...Permanent Magnets For Wind Turbines: An Alternative Viewpoint
28. July 2009
In the Summer 2009 edition of Magnetics Business & Technology, Tony Morcos of ACM Magnetics wrote an excellent article that dissects the growing conventional wisdom that near- and medium-term future growth in wind turbine production, will lead to vast shortages of neodymium-based [Nd-Fe-B] permanent magnets. Tony points out that permanent magnets are just one option [...]
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25. April 2010
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