A Minnesota blizzard has helped scientists understand airflow patterns around large wind turbines, paving the way for more efficient turbine designs and wind farm configurations, researchers report in Nature Communications. Wind farms lose roughly 10 to 20 percent of the Read more…
As one of nature’s most destructive forces, hurricanes are unstoppable storms that can cause total devastation for coastal communities. While Mother Nature is unpredictable and uncontrollable, there are researchers and scientists who think hurricanes can be weakened or even stopped. Read more…
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European nations installed a record number of offshore wind turbines during the first half of 2013, adding more than twice the capacity installed during the same period in 2012, according to the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA), an industry group. Read more…
Faced with growing opposition to land-based wind turbines in England, UK officials are looking to build hundreds of wind farms in Ireland that would generate electricity exclusively for the UK. Government officials say the £8 billion proposal, which includes the Read more…
The European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) assessed the offshore wind capacity in Europe over the last six months. They found that at the end of the first half of 2012, the continent’s offshore wind capacity grew by at an astonishing Read more…
Clearly, wind energy is favored to its fossil fuel counterparts in terms of its environmental footprint. Zero greenhouse gas emissions. Zero global warming potential. Zero heat islands. Simply, wind energy seems to be a perfect part of the solution to Read more…
The operators of large California wind farms are considering the use of advanced radar and telemetry systems to reduce the number of birds killed by spinning turbines located in critical migration pathways. The so-called avian radar systems, which have been Read more…
A new study has found that wind farms do not have long-term detrimental effects on most bird species, but that populations of some species can decline during site construction. In a long-term analysis of breeding and population trends for 10 Read more…
Japan’s nuclear disaster last year was more than a large-scale tragedy: it was a wake-up call to the dangers of nuclear power. Germany responded swiftly and decided to pull the plug on its reactors. All over the world a new Read more…
More than 9,600 megawatts of wind power capacity was installed in European Union member states in 2011, accounting for about 21 percent of all new power capacity installations, according to an industry report. New offshore wind farms in the UK Read more…
What developers and financiers of wind farm projects need to know. I attended the AWEA Fall Symposium in Carlsbad in November 2011. While it was a good industry gathering, I was intrigued by a panel discussion in which a representative Read more…
A recent auction held by the Brazilian National Electric Energy Agency (ANEEL), resulted in 42 new electricity generation projects with a total installed capacity of 1,211.5 megawatts (MW), to meet the projected demand of distribution companies in 2016. Of this Read more…
KiteGen thinks that current wind technology only scratches the surface of what’s possible with wind energy. That’s because wind turbines cannot reach higher and touch altitude wind. Rarely wind farms are sited at more than 100m above the ground; the Read more…