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Tag:

wind farms

Blizzard Helps Scientists Visualize Airflow Around Wind Turbines

written by Yale Environment 360

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 potential energy they could harvest, and complex airflow patterns play the largest role in those energy losses. Studying airflow around large turbines, which can be more than 100 meters tall, is not feasible in lab settings, so scientists typically test smaller turbine models in wind tunnels and use tracer particles to visualize airflow patterns.

Researchers from the University of Minnesota realized they could scale up their experiments to real-world conditions by using heavy snowfall during a blizzard to trace airflow patterns, as shown in this video.

Their findings show that airflow patterns under real-world conditions differ from smaller-scale laboratory tests in important ways, and those differences should be taken into account when designing turbines and wind farms.



June 26, 2014 0 comment
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Offshore Wind Turbines May Weaken Hurricanes

written by Walter Wang

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. One idea: wind turbines.

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February 26, 2014 1 comment
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New Maps Pinpointing Wind Turbines Will Help Track Effects on Wildlife

written by Yale Environment 360

More than 47,000 wind turbines dot the U.S. landscape, predominantly clustered in the Midwest and Great Plains, as a new interactive tool developed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) shows.

The maps — the first publicly-available, nationwide data set for wind energy generation — show the

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February 18, 2014 0 comment
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Europe’s Offshore Wind Sector is Growing, But Troubles Lie Ahead

written by Yale Environment 360

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.

A total of 277 new turbines in seven wind farms were

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July 15, 2013 0 comment
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Facing Opposition at Home, UK Looks to Build Wind Project in Ireland

written by Yale Environment 360

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 construction of more than 700

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October 10, 2012 0 comment
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European Offshore Wind Energy Continues to Grow by Leaps and Bounds

written by Walter Wang

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 rate from a year ago. A new report by the EWEA shows that there are 132 new offshore wind turbines, providing an additional

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July 25, 2012 0 comment
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Wind Energy Creates a Warming Effect, Study Finds

written by Walter Wang

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 a climate change problem.

At least, this is what we thought.

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June 25, 2012 4 comments
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Wind Farms Consider Radar Systems to Prevent Bird Deaths

written by Yale Environment 360

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 deployed at wind farms in Texas and Europe, would

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May 30, 2012 0 comment
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Wind Farms Little Threat To Most Bird Species, New Study Says

written by Yale Environment 360

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 bird species at 18 wind farms across

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April 14, 2012 0 comment
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Wind Power Comes to Fukushima

written by Walter Wang

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 wave of anti-nuclear sentiment emerged.

Now a consortium of more than ten Japanese

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February 22, 2012 0 comment
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EU Wind Energy Capacity Grew 11 Percent in 2011, Report Says

written by Yale Environment 360

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 and land-based projects in Sweden and Germany pushed EU

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February 7, 2012 0 comment
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Wind Developers and Utilities Beware – Curtailment Could Cost You

written by Walter Wang

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 from a major US developer and O&M (operations & maintenance) service provider to wind farms indicated that his

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January 20, 2012 0 comment
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Wind Power Takes Center Stage At Brazilian Power Auction

written by Walter Wang

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 total, 39 projects were wind farms, totaling 976.5 MW, or 81 percent of the total power traded in the

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January 6, 2012 1 comment
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KiteGen Aims Higher For Wind Power

written by Walter Wang

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 higher they go, the heavier, more unstable and expensive the apparatus becomes.

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December 22, 2011 2 comments
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