Wind Turbine power output is increased ten-fold by careful spacing, and direction of rotation, when compared to existing best practices.
Click image for video surveyGuest post by Roger E. Sowell
Summary: A new study from CalTech shows that wind-turbine spacing, location, and direction of rotation can increase average power output per acre (hectare) by ten-fold, compared to existing best practices. Professor John O. Dabiri of California Institute of Technology (CalTech) published a paper describing the impact on power production of spacing, location, and direction of rotation on vertical-axis wind turbines.
For images and video, see http://dabiri.caltech.edu/research/wind-energy.html
A preprint of the paper is available at http://dabiri.caltech.edu/publications/Da_JRSE11.pdf (675 kB)
VAWT (vertical axis wind turbines) that are spaced approximately 4 diameters apart, with adjacent VAWTs rotating in opposite directions, yield a ten-fold increase in power output per unit of land area, from 2 – 3 Watts per square meter of land, to 21 – 47 Watts per square meter when compared to modern horizontal-axis wind turbines.
This has great implications for new wind-farm projects, especially the economics and environmental impacts. It does not, however, address the Achilles heel of wind power, the intermittency of power production and the need to time-shift power production by some economic means of grid-scale storage and discharge.
From Dr. Dabiri’s paper:
Abstract
Modern wind farms comprised of horizontal-axis wind turbines (HAWTs) require significant land resources to separate each wind turbine from the adjacent turbine wakes. This aerodynamic constraint limits the amount of power that can be extracted from a given wind farm footprint. The resulting inefficiency of HAWT farms is currently compensated by using taller wind turbines to access greater wind resources at high altitudes, but this solution comes at the expense of higher engineering costs and greater visual, acoustic, radar and environmental impacts. We investigated the use of counter-rotating vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWTs) in order to achieve higher power output per unit land area than existing wind farms consisting of HAWTs. Full-scale field tests of 10-m tall VAWTs in various counter-rotating configurations were conducted under natural wind conditions during summer 2010. Whereas modern wind farms consisting of HAWTs produce 2 to 3 watts of power per square meter of land area,
these field tests indicate that power densities an order of magnitude greater can potentially be achieved by arranging VAWTs in layouts that enable them to extract energy from adjacent wakes and from above the wind farm. Moreover, this improved performance does not require higher individual wind turbine efficiency, only closer wind turbine spacing and a sufficient vertical flux of turbulence kinetic energy from the atmospheric surface layer. The results suggest an alternative approach to wind farming that has the potential to concurrently reduce the cost, size, and environmental impacts of wind farms.
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So, as Roger Sowell admits, whirligigs make absolutely no business sense, environmentalists lied to the duped politicians and continue to rob taxpayers, while traditionally produced electricity is much cheaper. And we have gas and coal reserves hat would last ’til Kingdom come (not to mention nuclear power, which is the way of the future, no matter what your preferences are).
Why praise this shameless waste? Why choke the economy? Why enrich the mountebanks?
Bystander:
Your post at July 17, 2011 at 12:01 pm provides another example of your reading difficulties.
My original post was at July 16, 2011 at 3:25 pm and said, in full:
“Wind turbines provide intermitent power so when they do operate to produce electricity to a grid they merely displace thermal power stations onto standby (with no reduction to fuel consumption and emissions) or onto part loading (with increased fuel consumption and emissions). The thermal power stations need to keep operating like that until the wind turbines stop operating.
In other words, wind tubines do not provide any useful electricity to a grid at any time.
Ten times nothing useful is nothing useful.”
If you can find any flaw in my explanation then I would be pleased to learn of it. But your comments are plain daft when they merely repeatedly claim my explanation is a “ridiculous statement”.
And I did not cite my own paper as proof that it was a valid source. When (at July 16, 2011 at 6:03 pm) you said you did not understand my brief explanation (at July 17, 2011 at 12:07 am) I replied by saying:
“For a more full explanation of why electricity from wind turbines to an electricity grid system
(a) increases fuel usage,
(b) emissions and
(c) costs
of electricity supply read
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/courtney_2006_lecture.pdf”
Saying where you can find a more full explanation of my argument enables you to better understand that argument and, therefore, to find any flaw in it.
I am not surprised that your comments on my explanation do not mention any flaw in my explanation but resort to daft comments, redherrings and a straw man.
Richard
Alexander Feht says on July 17, 2011 at 1:55 pm
There is a theme to the crazy renewable energy and the stupid legislation to outlaw the sales of incandescent lights in favor of those stupid mercury based folded flouros …
It is that politically powerful companies have convinced government to guarantee their high profits at our expense.
@Alexander Feht on July 17, 2011 at 1:55 pm
“So, as Roger Sowell admits, whirligigs make absolutely no business sense,”
I never said such. With government assistance in the form of subsidies, tax credits, grants, and other incentives, wind-turbine power farms make economic sense in many locations. If you object to such financial assistance for wind-turbines, are you also outraged over all the other forms of government assistance? If not, please explain why. I don’t know in which country you live, but in the US we have multitudes of incentives, tax reductions, tax credits, outright grants, and such for literally dozens of activities at the national and state level. Wind power is merely one of many, many such activities.
“environmentalists lied to the duped politicians and continue to rob taxpayers, while traditionally produced electricity is much cheaper.”
Again, I said no such thing. Politicians were convinced of the value of wind power for the long term, and they might have been right had a few things gone differently. It appeared that the US would run out of natural gas at one point. Being wrong in predicting the future is not the same as telling lies.
“And we have gas and coal reserves hat would lat ’til Kingdom come (not to mention nuclear power, which is the way of the future, no matter what your preferences are).”
I am on record here at WUWT, and my own blog, and through various speeches, as opposing nuclear power, and for excellent reasons. I have never said that gas and coal reserves will “last until Kingdom come” – those are your words, not mine. The facts are that, firstly, no one knows how much natural gas (or oil for that matter) exists, where it is, or what the extraction costs will be. The same is true for coal. There are estimates, nothing more. Secondly, no one knows the consumption rates of those fuels in the future. We have estimates, nothing more. Therefore, with an undetermined quantity to be consumed at an unknown rate, no one can ever state with confidence how many years supply exist. We can only estimate the years remaining.
And the preceding paragraph also is true for uranium, thorium, and any other mineral resource. No one knows. Nuclear is not the way of the future, not in its present form of producing deadly radioactive byproducts that endure for very long periods and require great vigilance, aging reactors that fail with alarming regularity, reactors that require prodigious amounts of ever-more-precious fresh water for cooling, and the prohibitively high cost of construction. Nuclear power is dead, and that is an excellent thing.
http://www.firstwind.com/news/media-advisory-first-wind-commemorate-completion-its-rollins-wind-project-community-celebration
July 20th? The windpower scam of the century is going to cut the ribbon on the day we landed on the moon back in 69.
Note: I didn’t know Enron trained astronauts……
KR says on July 17, 2011 at 12:19 pm
What crud would that be and why was it not being leached into the water table before the mining?
Roger Sowell:
At July 17, 2011 at 2:23 pm you say:
“With government assistance in the form of subsidies, tax credits, grants, and other incentives, wind-turbine power farms make economic sense in many locations.”
With respect, that statement is an error; it needs to be corrected to say;
“With government assistance in the form of subsidies, tax credits, grants, and other incentives, wind-turbine power farms make FINANCIAL sense TO THEIR OWNERS.”
They are incorrectly titled “windfarms” and are more accurately titled “subsidy farms”.
Richard
If vertical axis turbine produce 10x more then horizontal axis turbines, will not the capacity of backup generators (gas turbines, etc) need to be 10x more? Just asking.
Just a few miles west of Ellensburg WA there use to be a vertical. Now the area is plastered with horizontal. Reminds me of the old challenge, ‘Just sit on it and spin.’
Richard Sharpe
Strip mining opens the buried mineral content to water percolation, starting with sulfuric acid from the coal bed (dead streams, infertile soil, etc.), sedimentation rates in nearby waterways 1000x higher, diversion of groundwater, permanent changes in landscape and drainage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_coal_mining_and_burning).
This is stuff not leached into the groundwater before because the ground was not disturbed – the sulfur, iron, and other components were locked into the coal.
I grew up in that area – sometimes the water just ran orange, smelling of rotten eggs…
Your claim that “wind tubines do not provide any useful electricity to a grid at any time.” remains ridiculous.
Richard Courtney cites a paper by Richard S Courtney as validation of what, exactly? As said – citing your paper as support of your assertions doesn’t make you assertion any more valid. Your claims have been repeatedly debunked already – but since you asked here we go;
Your claim “A thermal power station takes days to start producing electricity from a cold start” is referenced to a non-existing citation. So this claim is unsupported. And is fundamental to your straw man argument, so everything that follows and all the assumptions based on that claim are negated.
To make that claim you have to ignore that hydro-power, gas and nuclear power generation rates can be spun up / down readily. In the EU wind power is frequently traded where hydro-power is the alternative source so there is little cost or waste in switching over thus making your claim bogus.
Your next citation is of a single power plant – which is a specialty plant at Alholmens – that operates differently than a gas and nuclear plants. In other words you are extrapolating your claims by cherry picking the reference point – which of course makes your assertion bogus.
A wind turbine’s capacity factor is based on the wind profile for the area. A constant steady speed wind will result in a good capacity factor. Most areas have a profile that is front loaded, that is the wind blows at lower speeds more often than higher speeds. Turbine designers balance the cost of materials against maximizing output. They want to take advantage of the relatively higher speeds that occur less frequently. This balance is the reason a well sited wind turbine will typically have no better than a 30% capacity factor. If it has a higher capacity factor than that then it either in a unique constant wind speed location or the generator is undersized for the blades’ swept area.
The problem with wind economically is that they cost so much to build compared to the power and reliability we get in return. The bulk of a wind turbine’s subsidies are in the form of power production subsidies. The more power they produce the more taxpayer money they receive……18 dollars per MwH produced. Do the math, we can’t afford to produce a large percentage of our power from these renewable sources under this economic model.
Somebody mentioned Denmark……..They have less wind power than the state of Texas and they import much of their power from other countries. They have very high residential electric rates and Norway looked at their system and said no thanks.
Therefore, if the average power output of a wind turbine is about 20% of nameplate, with a 10-fold increase, it will now be able to produce 200% of nameplate! Really? /sarc
This optinism is similar to the claim on the Danish Windpower Web Site 2 years ago that wind power pays for itself in 3 months. After a re-analysis of the Danish example, I calculated the real payback period to be 130 years.
I also re-analyzed the 14.87 EROEI claim made of the Livermore pass project at 0.29.
I don’t care how you try to twist this wind power nonsense around, the result is the same. Wind power is unsustainable.
http://www.windpowerfraud.com.
This is an interesting paper.
I am a little suspicious of the power density comparison being made in the paper.
1. VAWTs are less efficient than HAWTs when operated as individual units.
2. The area of a real wind farm involves more than turbine separation requirements.
3. Wind speed increases with height. It is possible that the required VAWT spacings will increase with increasing turbine height.
4. The cross-sectional area swept out by the turbine blades is a critical factor in determining power generation of a turbine. For a given power output, this number will need to be similar for HAWT and VAWT. I suspect that a pair of closely spaced counter-rotating VAWTs has poorer performance than a single HAWT with the same total swept area.
5. The researchers should install several HAWTs with equivalent swept area to compare power density performance in the same location, wind conditions, temperatures, etc.
Roger Sowell says:
July 17, 2011 at 2:23 pm
If you object to such financial assistance for wind-turbines, are you also outraged over all the other forms of government assistance?
One word, Roger:
Yes.
Bystander:
As an anonymois troll you are failing badly.
The conclusion of my post at July 17, 2011 at 2:09 pm said to you;
“I am not surprised that your comments on my explanation do not mention any flaw in my explanation but resort to daft comments, redherrings and a straw man.”
At July 17, 2011 at 5:30 pm you respond with more of the same nonsense and nothing else.
Are you trying to convince yourself? Your nonsense cannot convince anybody else.
Richard
Bystander and Roger Sowell:
As an aid to your comprehension, I point out the following.
If wind power were sensible then oil tankers would be sailng ships.
Richard
@roger Sewell, on July 17, 2011 at 7:50 am:
Actually, it matters a great deal that power production per square meter increases 10-fold. Normally, increases in power production, or efficiency, are made in small increments.
Roger, although I explained it in my post, you don’t seem to understand what an increase in efficiency is. With 10 times more power prodution per square meter, what you have is an increase in power production. But this only means an increase in efficiency IF it costs you less than 10 times more money to achieve it.
As another example, if I have a fuel-powered electricity generator with 1 MW power that procuces 1MWH per X dollars that I spend in it (fuel, maintenance costs, amortization…), and I change it for another fuel-powered electricity generator which is the same size but with 2 MW power, hey, that’s great, I can now feed 2MW of machines… however it will only be more efficient if I have to pay less than X dollars per MWH of energy produced. I may have available twice as much electric energy, but if it is, say, three times more expensive, I am not more efficient, I am less efficient.
Friends:
This is information to all although it does arise from one of the errors of Bystander who lies that I made the logical error of ‘generalising from the particular’.
David Tolley (Head of Networks and Ancillary Services, Innogy (a subsidiary of the German energy consortium RWE that operates windfarms and coal-fired power stations) has said of windfarms in the UK,
“When [thermal] plant is de-loaded to balance the system, it results in a significant proportion of deloaded plant which operates relatively inefficiently. … Coal plant will be part-loaded such that the loss of a generating unit can swiftly be replaced by bringing other units on to full load. In addition to increased costs of holding reserve in this manner, it has been estimated that the entire benefit of reduced emissions from the renewables programme has been negated by the increased emissions from part-loaded plant under NETA.”
(NETA is the New Electricity Trading Arrangements, the UK’s deregulated power market.).
Bystander attempted to discredit facts I presented about an entire national electricity supply by wrongly asserting;
“Your next citation is of a single power plant – which is a specialty plant at Alholmens – that operates differently than a gas and nuclear plants. In other words you are extrapolating your claims by cherry picking the reference point – which of course makes your assertion bogus.”
I have never never cited – or mentioned – any plant at Alholmens.
Richard
>>Bystander
>>To make that claim you have to ignore that hydro-power, gas and nuclear
>>power generation rates can be spun up / down readily. In the EU wind power
>>is frequently traded where hydro-power is the alternative source so there is
>>little cost or waste in switching over thus making your claim bogus.
Unless you live in Scandinavia, there is not enough hydro or pumped storage capacity to soak up the variability; even if just 5% of our total power was being generated via wind. In the UK, we have a system to backup 5% of electrical power for just 5 hours – and yet the wind can go off line for days, not hours. Plus, this backup system is already 100% engaged in trying to smooth out customer demand, without it having to soak up variability in supply as well.
Nuclear power, as I understand it, is not very good at instantaneous power changes. Ask the technicians at Chernobyl about that one. Coal is likewise hopeless at varying its supply levels over the short term.
Gas can be switched on much quicker, which is why the UK power industry has just lobbied the government to build 17 new gas power stations. But this will simply double again the cost of wind power, which is already 3 times the cost of coal. Plus, this gas is likely to be Algerian or Libyan. Do you really think we can rely on these supplies, to keep the home fires burning? We need to think about energy security, as well as economics and constancy.
I think the argument that wind power is 100% useless, comes from the observation that it requires 100% backup by other generation systems. Why not just delete the wind element, and have done with it, and make the electrical power much cheaper too? And even if you had a large pumped storage system, how long are you going to save the water for? Proff Mackay said, in his influential sustainable energy report, that we should store water for 2 days. But of what use is that, when all UK wind went off-line for 6 weeks during Jan-Feb 2010??
And it would help if Richard could explain himself properly, instead of resorting to calling everyone a troll. He has still not explained why fractured coals seams are of benefit to the coal mining industry, and prefers to shout ‘troll’ instead.
.
>>Richard.
>>Coal plant will be part-loaded such that the loss of a generating unit can
>>swiftly be replaced by bringing other units on to full load. In addition to
>>increased costs of holding reserve in this manner, it has been estimated that
>>the entire benefit of reduced emissions from the renewables programme has
>>been negated by the increased emissions from part-loaded plant under NETA.
Yes, but in an integrated and logical energy supply system, you don’t use the coal plants as variable energy producers !!!
Logically, we should keep the coal stations running at 100%, and use the gas stations for adjusting variability. The only reason this does not work at present, is because the UK industry is fragmented; and the gas generating companies do not wish to be penalised all the time, by being ordered to reduce power and thus reduce profits.
This absurd situation will only resolve itself when:
a. All producers are compelled to have 20% of their production from gas, which can be ordered to reduce power levels by the grid, as wind power becomes available.
or,
b. We topple all the windelec towers, and devise a proper electrical system based upon nuclear power.
.
@ur momisugly Richard S Courtney says: “As an anonymois troll you are failing badly.”
The fact is your “study” is based on bad assumptions and cherry picking – resorting to personal attacks rather than addressing those shortcoming only confirms that your “study” is wrong.
@ur momisugly Richard S Courtney says “I have never never cited – or mentioned – any plant at Alholmens”
From YOUR link;
You write “Each thermal power station is designed to provide an output of electricity. It can only provide
very little more or very little less than this output (i.e. a power station has a “low turndown
ratio”)” THAT IS DEAD WRONG BTW.
Your citation is “16. Flynn P & Kumar A, ‘Site visit to Alholmens 240 MW power plant, Pietarsaari, Finland’ University of Alberta, September 2005″
Richard S Courtney
Looking at some actual numbers, California currently has >6.8 TWh/year from wind, about 2.3% of total energy (not much right now), with renewables accounting for 25% or so of new energy construction worldwide (so the percentage is increasing). (http://www.energy.ca.gov/wind/)
With ~25% of new power construction being renewables, there’s some indication there that a lot of energy planners think it’s a good idea…
In 1993 the CA costs were ~7.5 cents per kWh, estimated to reduce below 3.5 cents per kWh over the next 10 years.
As to your concerns about how long it takes fossil fueled supplies to kick in as backups – gas turbines take very little time indeed, and in fact were just approved as backups for nuclear power (http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?storyCode=2057711). They’ve been used as peak power backups for quite a while (http://www.naturalgas.org/overview/uses_eletrical.asp), “…as it is possible to quickly and easily turn them on.”
Your statement “In other words, wind tubines do not provide any useful electricity to a grid at any time.”, due to partial load backups, is simply not correct.
Richard S Courtney
I see our posts crossed while we were writing.
If your backup is coal power, yes, it will take quite a while to ramp up. Coal is a poor fit for backup power as a result. It’s also not a good idea at any rate, due to the level of pollution including mercury and radioisotopes, the amount of CO2 released (it’s what, about twice as much as natural gas per kWh?), ash dumps, strip mines, and the like.
I realize you have a preference for coal, you having worked in that field for quite some time, but it’s really not the best way to make electricity once you factor in all the costs that the rest of us end up paying. If you want to go for centralized power plants rather than renewables, nuclear (in particular breeder reactors) is a much better way to go.