World Wind Watch | Green Energy News

November 26, 2006 – Vol. 11 No. 36

WORLD WIND WATCH.

The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) has announced that the new leader in the ownership of installed wind capacity is Iberdrola of Spain.

To achieve this status Iberdrola purchased ScottishPower which owns No. 2 US wind developer PPM Energy, thus the combined Iberdrola-ScottishPower will own or control 5,700 MW of installed wind energy and be the world’s largest owner of wind power projects. Prior to this merger FPL Energy had held that slot.

Iberdrola has big plans for the US as well: develop 10,000 MW of wind power in the US by 2011. According to the AWEA the company has already secured 2700 megawatts of turbine capacity from Gamesa. Gamesa has shops in Pennsylvania which are sure to grow with further sales.

Visit the AWEA at http://www.awea.org/ Iberdrola at http://www.iberdrola.es/ PPM Energy at http://www.ppmenergy.com/ ScottishPower at http://www.scottishpower.com and Gamesa at http://www.gamesa.es/

This editor had the joy, and the pain, during the Thanksgiving holiday to get up-close and personal with a rather long set of wind turbine blades.

The joy was to see these magnificent, more-than-two-tractor-trailer-lengths-long blades en route in a specially-built trailer to making clean energy. That joy was also seeing them in a such a public place - US I-95 in Delaware - so more (at least those who recognized what they were) would get interested and appreciate wind energy.

The pain was that the truckload of turbine blades help snarl traffic which I was in.

As long blades are now, they keep getting longer.

GE has announced that its newest version of its 2.5xl wind turbine is now available with a rotor diameter of 328 feet (100 meters) up from 288 feet from the previous version.

The increase in diameter gives the new version of the turbine a 12-percent increase in annual energy yield. The new diameter blades will also allow the 2.5xl to operate at capacity at sites with average wind speeds of 8.5 meters per second, about 19 miles per hour. The new version of the 2.5 megawatt turbine has the largest available diameter for onshore applications and is sure to stop traffic when being transported to a site. Visit GE wind energy at http://www.gepower.com/