New Generator Boosts Wind Turbine Efficiency 50% 315
MagnetDroid writes "A startup company based in Vancouver has developed a new kind of generator that could harvest much more energy from the wind. The design could not only lower the cost of wind turbines but increase their power output by 50 percent to as much as 100 percent, in some locations. Normally, when wind speeds drop, a turbine's engine becomes less efficient. The new engine, from ExRo Technologies, runs efficiently over a wider range of conditions. The design replaces a mechanical transmission with what amounts to an electronic one. Magnets attached to a rotating shaft create a current, but individual coils can be turned on and off electronically at different wind speeds." The company will begin field-testing a small, 5KW wind turbine by early next year.
Re:This perpetual motion machine just keeps gettin (Score:5, Informative)
TFA doesn't mention specific percentage improvements in efficiency. That was kdawson's contribution, and then only in the poorly-worded headline. TFA is claiming that the overall output of a given wind turbine could be boosted by 50% or more by altering the dynamics of the generator to make it more efficient over a wider range of wind speeds.
Basically, turbines are most efficient at a given speed, and efficiency drops off for anything outside of that, whether faster or slower. This new design attempts to address that by decreasing the amount by which the efficiency drops off at different speeds. The improvement in the efficiency curve boosts overall power output, as the turbine isn't as strictly limited to a given wind speed for peak efficiency as it was before.
Re:This perpetual motion machine just keeps gettin (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This perpetual motion machine just keeps gettin (Score:3, Informative)
If 1 wind turbine can output 1MW. Increasing that to 2MW would be 100% more output. It can still only be 10% efficient, but the output has doubled. 50% more efficient would be 1.5MW. Heck it could be possible to get up to 1000% more efficient (10MW), and still be at under 50% efficiency.
Maths, don't leave home with out it.
Re:Even less dependency on foreign oil (Score:5, Informative)
But, we are all going to have to get over seeing them as ugly or migratory-bird killers for this program to work.
And to do my part, I'll point out as I do in most wind turbine threads that windmills are not significant bird killers any more. In fact the very worst wind farm ever, Altamont Pass, killed fewer birds per year than a typical 3-story office building. And that was combining multiple worst-case factors, like an outdated scaffold design that encouraged raptors to nest on them, smaller fast-moving blades that are proven to be more difficult for birds to see and avoid, and a highly disadvantageous location in a choke point for bird migrations.
Modern wind mills have monolithic poles with rounded tops that birds can't nest or sit on, and have much larger, slower moving blades* that birds can see and avoid. I believe now they also do some cursory environmental studies to make sure they aren't putting the windmills directly in bird migratory paths, but with the other two improvements this probably isn't even that big a deal.
I'm a bird nerd. I love birds. If you can accept the bird deaths caused by glass windows in cities, windmills are not an issue.
Oh, and I think they're rather beautiful. :)
*Largely for efficiency reasons, the bigger the blade the more efficient. IIRC, the way they choose the sizes for windmill blades these days is by what will fit on the largest legally allowed trailer. I've seen convoys of trucks, each with very long trailers, each carrying *one* blade.
Other applications (Score:4, Informative)
According to the company's website [exro.com], which does have pictures of the design for anyone who is interested, this could be used with other energy sources than wind:
While this overview focuses primarily on the wind applications, VIEG Technology is expected to have a material impact on the economic viability of a wide range of renewable energy applications.
There you go. I predict this could be more applicable in tidal energy than traditional big-dam hydro, although it might be useful in small, run-of-the-river projects to make them more efficient. They might even be useful in big run-of-the-river projects [plutonic.ca], which will create over 1,000 megawatts of new electricity in the next few years in British Columbia alone.
Re:Even less dependency on foreign oil (Score:3, Informative)
They kill more bats than birds, as an fyi. And the birds they do get are mostly local low flying species- most (not all) migrants tend to fly high. The interesting thing is that most of the animals aren't killed by impacts, but by massive internal bleeding from decompression as they get caught in the low pressure zone behind the blade.
Actually, I think I might have read that in a link off /. Or possibly BiologyNews.net
I like windmills, but I think there has to be some way to mitigate the danger they pose to flying animals without impairing the efficiency or adding huge amounts to the cost. Would a cage around the blade path, like the ones we have on home floor fans, be a potential answer? It doesn't have to be closely spaced, you're not trying to keep out kid's fingers after all, but it would need to be sturdy enough to withstand moderate hail storms.
Re:PICS OR GTFO (Score:4, Informative)
Right, because pictures are proof. Just like the phantom console, which had pictures (http://gamedeveloper.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=19801) and is totally real right now. In fact, I'm playing the invisible version as I'm typing this!
Re:This perpetual motion machine just keeps gettin (Score:3, Informative)
That's called maximum power point tracking and is pretty old in concept and in actual use today in many thousands of wind and / or solar installations.
Re:This perpetual motion machine just keeps gettin (Score:2, Informative)
Yep, but since the most efficient turbines are already at more than half Betz' limit this is simply not going to work.
Where was this? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Even less dependency on foreign oil (Score:4, Informative)
Spot on. The 'windmills kill birds' argument is just another way for the 'we're against everything' crowd to try to stop any kind of change, for better or worse.
Re:I wonder... (Score:3, Informative)
been there, done that, as have *countless* others. Really, I don't know how this even begins to classify as 'new'.
Automatic star-delta switches have been done, same with electronic versions that do voltage conversion so that the maximum amount of power flows to the grid (or the batteries for off-grid systems).
Wind power is *full* of snake oil companies and investor scams. As well as people that try to pass off old stuff as new.
Re:This perpetual motion machine just keeps gettin (Score:5, Informative)
It's kind of like a transmission. It's actually also kind of like the reverse of the adjustable displacement engines in some vehicles.
In some cars, you have an 8-cylinder engine but can use 4, 6, or 8 cylinders at various times based on the amount of power you need to generate. It doesn't take 8 5 liters of displacement to maintain highway speeds, but getting up to them quickly may. Turning off cylinders not in use saves fuel by not burning it when it's not needed. Each cylinder only draws chemical energy to make kinetic energy as needed.
If you left all the coils engaged, you might have too much resistance to generate any electricity in light winds and too much to generate it efficiently in more moderate winds. Yet if you build a turbine specifically for only light or moderate winds, you don't get any additional power once it is maxed out.
This solution uses wind, but you can't just press down on a pedal and ask for more wind (well, you could ask, but you'd be disappointed most of the time). So what it does instead is it has a magnet-in-coil generator with separately activated coils. Each coil only draws mechanical energy to make electricity as the mechanical energy is available. The rest of the coils are left as open circuits. If there's enough wind to turn the blades with half the coils on but not all of them (or too slowly to make sense with all of them), then you just open the circuits on half the coils and the other half keep generating. Only the coils in a closed circuit generate current and present meaningful resistance to the turbine. As you have more wind, you generate more power up to the maximum. The maximum number of coils doesn't impede this turbine from generating less current when some wind is still available though, because it just disconnects the spare coils until they are needed.
Re:This perpetual motion machine just keeps gettin (Score:5, Informative)
Windmills don't have that luxury, so often are working at RPM's that are not optimum. This method (if it works) widens the optimum range.
Close but not quite what they're getting at. What they're doing is increasing/decreasing the resistance to keep the windmill in the optimum RPM range over a larger range of wind speeds. So at 5 mph, the blades might spin at 20 rpm and generate 2 MW. At 15 mph, with the new system the blades still spin at 20 rpm, but now generate 5 MW. As oposed to traditional generators, where it would be spinning at 30 rpm and only generating 3 MW.
Re:Cumberland Gap (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Nice work! (Score:2, Informative)
Indeed, I think we've had this sort of thing for a while in Record players, they call it Direct Drive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technics_SL-1200 [wikipedia.org]
Re:Think of the salmon! (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. There was recently an article in the local Portland, OR news about how the windfarms that have been installed in the Columbia River Basin may actually have a detrimental impact on salmon. Apparently, some parts of the electrical grid in this part of the country are operating near peak capacity. When the wind really kicks in and pushes the grid to its limits, other parts have to lower production. In our case, this means letting a lot more water spill over the dams. This, in turn, tends to introduce way too much nitrogen into the water, which harms the fishies. Or so goes the theory.
Re:I wonder... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Even less dependency on foreign oil (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.ucalgary.ca/news/aug2008/batdeaths [ucalgary.ca]
Apparently bat lungs are sensitive to sudden pressure changes.
Generator/magneto distinction. (Score:3, Informative)
Whoever added the tag has no clue. This IS a generator.
It generates. So loosely speaking it's a generator.
But there is a terminology distinction when you get into TYPES of things that generate. They all have coils and a field in relative motion to create the output voltage. But a "generator" creates the field with electromagnets (generally using more coils driven by an external electrical source, a side-effect of the current in the output coils, or otherwise by pulling power from the input shaft) as opposed to a "magneto" which uses permanent magnets.
For wind generators this is a significant distinction: The field coils can gobble up a lot of power - and more when the wind is lower, when you have less (or none) to spare. Paying for that up front, by shelling out for somewhat pricey permanent magnets, is (at least for small mills) far better than paying as-you-go by pulling power off the top of your output. With magnetos you get it all. Thus the recent availability of high-strength neodymium magnets has led to a revolution in magneto design.
But with magnetos you have a harder time controlling the "wild AC" from the wind-speed variation: With generators you can adjust the field to regulate them. With magnetos you're stuck with the output voltage you get, driven by the RPM. This is a problem: The power available from the wind with a given rotor size varies with the third power of the wind speed. But (assuming you don't vary the blade pitch or have a variable transmission between the turbine and the magneto) the RPM and voltage go with the first power. That means the available current goes up with the second power of wind speed and the resistive heating in the coils with the FOURTH power.
Burnout is the limit on your output. So there are a number of ways of matching a wind turbine to a load and avoiding self-destruction. Some of them work by throwing away a lot of power in high winds that it would be nice to keep.
Re:This perpetual motion machine just keeps gettin (Score:3, Informative)
Get real; you won't see home wind turbines, at least not en masse. They have too much vibration and transmitted noise to hook up to your house plus I'm sure the neighbors might object to the aesthetics.
I'm sure most of these 223 small wind turbines [allsmallwindturbines.com] are quite suitable for home use.
Re:There are still critical flaws with wind power (Score:2, Informative)
A whole series of tired old canards. This post smells like industry shill to me. I'll knock over just a few, and let somebody else tackle the rest.
The biggest and lamest of the lot: "backup power will still need to be built".
What a load. Where do you think power comes from right now?! Moonbeams and happy thoughts? I'll give you a hint. We call them power plants. We have lots of them. They generate power, right now. In fact, I have this computer plugged into one at this very moment. Amazing, isn't it?
Wide deployment of windmills could allow us to avoid building other types of new power plants to handle increasing demand. Seriously wide deployment of windmills could allow us to shut down some or many coal-fired power plants. The remaining existing plants can continue to run, handling the load when wind ebbs. Extremely wide deployment, meaning continent-spanning deployment, could conceivably allow us to shut down all of the existing coal plants. The wind may not be blowing here right now, but it's probably blowing somewhere else, and it's not hard to believe that it's always blowing somewhere. The one constant of Earth's atmosphere is that it is never constant. Something is always changing, which means air is always moving.
Personally I expect there will always be some sort of non-wind non-solar base in the power grid, but I can easily imagine it being hydro and nuclear, without a single combustion-based plant in operation.
Second biggest, and still quite lame: wind power is far more expensive than other sources of power.
Economics 101: do something a lot, it gets cheaper. Mine a lot of coal? It gets really cheap. Same thing can and will happen to windmills. But this is even worse for you than it first appears. Coal plants are not ever actually cheap, no matter how many you build. Nobody builds a coal plant for less than a billion dollars, and a 600 megawatt plant costs in the neighborhood of $2 billion to build. Windmills cost roughly $1 million per megawatt. So we can build 2000 megawatts of windmills for the cost of 600 megawatts of a coal plant. And then, the source of energy is free. Coal keeps costing. Sure it may actually take all 2000 megawatts of windmills to actually produce as much power annually as a 600 megawatt coal plant, due to wind variability, but still, free wind beats not-free coal all year long. Considering that the cost per windmill will come down as more people try to get in on the market and manufacturing capacity goes up, coal loses yet again. There are extremely few organizations capable of building a multi-megawatt coal power plant, while it's downright easy to build a 2-3 megawatt windmill.
Third, negative impact on human health when people are located close enough to a wind farm.
The only worthy responses to this one are snide. We can go for the Wikipedia-esque bitchslap [Citation Needed] or we can say yeah, if you stick your head into the blade arc, it will have a negative impact on your health, ar ar ar. You choose. Either way, it sounds like crap to me, especially compared to living downwind from a coal-fired plant.
So many others, so little time. Do you even know what the word sublime means?
Re:PICS OR GTFO (Score:3, Informative)
as far as i can tell, this technology has nothing to do with Betz' law [wikipedia.org] or the theoretical efficiency of a wind turbine. in fact it has nothing to do with the design of the fan blades or rotor efficiency.
instead, the innovation here is replacing a mechanical transmission with an electric one. this allows the turbine to perform optimally under a wide range of wind speeds. this could just as easily be applied to gasoline engine power generator or other non-turbine/fluid-mechanics-related power generators.
it's like being able to switch out the transmission depending on the wind speed. we already have separate generators that operate optimally at low speeds, medium speeds, and high speeds. this is just a cheap & simple way to incorporate multiple performance ranges into a single electric transmission.