Texas Center Eyes Building A Better Wind Farm

Pete Danko for EarthTechling Image: The new SWiFT research facility (image via Texas Tech University) On the wind-swept plain of the Texas panhandle, government, academic and industry researchers are now taking on the challenge of making wind power better, with a particular focus on the hugely important question of how turbines arrayed in a group affect each other. “Some estimates show that 10 to 40 percent of wind energy production and revenue is lost due to complex wind plant interaction,” said Jon White, Sandia National Laboratory’s technical lead for the just-commissioned research center at Texas TechUniversity, dubbed SWiFT, for Scaled Wind Farm Technology. Wake energy loss and wake-induced loads are the kinds of thing that can be simulated and studied with sophisticated computer programs. But at SWiFT, reseachers have actually turbines installed in the field, three to start with more possibly to come, to work with. There are also two 60-meter weather tower…
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Floating Wind Turbine In Maine A Game Changer

Image: The world’s first full-scale floating wind turbine, Hywind, being assembled in the Åmøy Fjord near Stavanger, Norway in 2009, before deployment in the North Sea. Offshore wind turbines could more than quadruple the United States’ wind energy production, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Until now, the United States has lagged behind countries like Denmark and the U.K. in installing offshore wind turbines, despite the vastly larger shorelines. That situation will likely change with the recent installation of a floating wind turbine off of the coast of Maine, the first such device in North America. About the floating wind turbine project The U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Maine teamed up to create the first North American floating wind turbine, situated just off the coast of Castine, in south-central Maine. Maine is particularly well-suited for generating wind energy because of the prevailing northeasterly winds that blow almost constant…
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