World Wind Watch | Green Energy News

August 6, 2006 – Vol.11 No.20

WORLD WIND WATCH.

From a distance large, grid-connected, utility scale wind turbines seem simple and, to some beautiful and graceful, industrial works of art.

A closer examination of the turbines - under the hood if you will - reveals more complex machines but machines that use time-tested and ordinary technologies: Concrete and steel towers hold the turbines in the sky. Gears and electric generators generate power. Computer controls and wind monitoring equipment keep the machines humming. (Who thinks of computers as high tech these days?)

So where’s the real high technology in wind turbines? It’s in the design, construction and manufacturing of the long slender blades.

For the most part wind turbine blades are made from composite materials : glass reinforced plastic, plastic reinforced with carbon fibers, even wood reinforced by plastic and fibers. All of them are composite materials technologies that have been steadily improving over the decades and have allowed the wind turbine industry to flourish.

The longer the blades - the greater the swept area - the more power a turbine can generate. And, the lighter the blades - the less mass - the less wind will be needed to turn them. Without composites neither amazingly long (up to 200 feet) and comparatively light turbine blades would not be possible.

With composites the cost of wind energy is down to about 4 cents a kilowatt hour. In some markets nearly competitive with conventional energy.

Of great help to the wind energy industry has been the work spanning 17 years at Sandia National Labs to test and analyze existing wind turbine blade technology as well as develop new materials technologies that could be used to build even better designs. With the wonders of the Internet the lab’s results over nearly two decades have created one of the largest open-access data bases on wind turbine materials testing in the world. Since 1989 the lead investigators John Mandell and Samborsky have accumulated 10,000 results on about 150 different composite materials.

Work at the wind turbine materials research lab is cosponsored by the US Department of Energy and Montana State University. Visit it at http://www.sandia.gov/wind/Blades.htm