“Turkey has been moving aggressively on installing wind power, going from 19MW at the start of 2006 to 84M this year.”
This blog relayed a lament from the Naib that American companies should be dominating the wind turbine market. Then Autoblog Green relayed an announcement from General Electric Energy. 52 of their latest 2.5MW wind turbines will equip a new 130MW wind farm now being installed in Bahce, Turkey.
The GE turbines have a rotor diameter of 328 ft, plus active yaw and pitch regulated with power/torque control capability. While the new turbines have the ability to operate at average wind speeds as low as 19mph, GE Energy indicates they are ideal for off-shore applications where there are higher average wind power densities.
Hub rotor diameters have increased to make use of more wind resources. The Enercon E112 has a hub height of 124 meters – significantly taller than a 3 story building – giving the turbine the capacity to generate six megawatts, enough to supply power to 4000 homes in Dardesheim, Germany.
The current Wikipedia entry about wind turbines notes that the European design, i.e., three-bladed HAWTs (Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines), championed by Danish turbine manufacturers, predominates. These have high tip speeds of up to six times the wind speed, high efficiency, and low torque ripple, features that contribute to better reliability.
Newer turbines can make use of wind at lower velocities because of the greater size of the blades and because of blade pitch systems. Trimming the pitch of the turbine blades compensates for changes in wind velocity, thus making the energy output of the wind turbines more consistent. Most HAWTs are installed upwind.
One might suppose that there is American investment in the Turkey wind farm. Such farms can be built relatively quickly and with relatively low capital investment, which could be a reason for a boom in the wind power market in China.
Throughout the world wind turbines are being installed off-shore, near shore and on-shore. Investment in wind farm development requires assessment of wind patterns. In general, sites with a Wind Power Class rating of 4 or higher are now preferred for large scale wind plants. But, before you consult your wind resources atlas, bear in mind historical information could be invalid since those measurements were made at levels different than the typical height at which modern wind turbines now are installed.
More up-to-date information comes from the mapping of wind resources using satellite-based, SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar). Such scatterometer and altimeter data, combined with more traditional meteorological observations, present a better assessment of wind resources and potential capacity of wind farms.
