[lbo-talk] NYT: Wind Power's New Current

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Thu Aug 28 04:23:24 PDT 2003


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/28/technology/circuits/28wind.html

The New York Times August 28, 2003

Wind Power's New Current

By SCOTT KIRSNER

S TANDING on top of a hill in central Massachusetts, Jonathan

Fitch is surrounded by a grove of eight tall white windmills. He

regards them like someone eager to trade in an old car.

The windmills were installed in 1984 so that the town of Princeton

would receive at least a small fraction of its power from a

nonpolluting source. But now three of the windmills are broken, a

result of direct hits by lightning, and their manufacturer has

gone out of business.

Mr. Fitch, general manager of the Princeton Municipal Light

Department, is planning to upgrade his wind farm. The town-owned

utility is overseeing a $4 million project to replace the eight

older windmills with two gargantuan modern ones. The current

system generates enough electricity for about 1 percent of the

town's 1,450 households; the new one, expected to be in place next

year, is to satisfy roughly 40 percent of the town's appetite for

power.

The windmill replacement project in Princeton is being undertaken

in part because of major advances in technology over the last 20

years. Today's windmills - often called wind turbines - are

quieter and more reliable, and they generate more power at a lower

cost. Unlike the older windmills in Princeton, they are outfitted

with dozens of sensors and connected to a network that allows them

to be monitored remotely, from a PC or laptop.

"The efficiency of the turbines has gone up about 5 percent every

year," said Philipp Andres, a vice president for business

development at Vestas American Wind Technology, a subsidiary of

the world's largest manufacturer of wind turbines. Referring to

the rule of thumb for the steady doubling of the power of

microchips, he added, "That's not quite as dramatic an increase as

Moore's Law, but it is certainly significant."

Perhaps most important, the new generation of wind turbines are

bigger, a fact provoking controversy almost everywhere utilities

have proposed to put them up - most notably off Cape Cod, where a

developer called Cape Wind Associates hopes to build the nation's

first offshore wind farm, using turbines that will rise 426 feet

from the water.

Utilities and independent developers are nonetheless moving ahead

with plans to increase the generating capacity of older

installations and establish new wind farms. Michael O'Sullivan, a

senior vice president at FPL Energy, the biggest domestic operator

of wind farms, said that 2003 "will probably be the second-biggest

year in the industry's history, in terms of adding capacity,"

exceeded only by 2001.

As the country's electrical demand continues to rise, adding

capacity is of keen interest. And the power derived from wind is

power that a town like Princeton does not need to buy from sources

that rely on coal-burning generators or nuclear plants.

But the independence afforded by wind power is only partial. "You

can't rely on it every day," Mr. Fitch said. "You have to have

some backup contract in place." Moreover, in avoiding large-scale

blackouts like the one two weeks ago, wind power is not

necessarily a solution, because the windmills themselves generally

need a voltage supply to operate. While Mr. Fitch expects the more

modern turbines to provide the town with modest savings in energy

costs - perhaps $90,000 a year compared with other sources - the

environmental considerations are the main attraction.

The power generated by Princeton's aging wind turbines has

actually cost more than electricity from other sources, Mr. Fitch

said, but the new technology changes that equation. Unlike the

old-fashioned rural windmills used to pump water, which whipped

back and forth with every gust, today's wind turbines rely on an

electronic nervous system that allows them to predict the force

and direction of the wind up to 24 hours in advance, and adjust

the orientation of the rotor and even the pitch of each individual

blade in order to wring the maximum energy out of a passing

breeze.

Electricity is generated at the top of the windmills, in a boxlike

structure called the nacelle, to which the rotors are attached.

"The rotors can be as large as the wingspan of a 747," said Jim

Lyons, the advanced-technology leader for GE Wind Energy, the

biggest domestic maker of turbines. At the bottom of the tower

that supports the nacelle and rotor is a cylindrical space housing

the computers that collect data from throughout the turbine. The

collection of computers is known as a Scada system, for

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition.

The Scada system can supply 200 or more pieces of data related to

the turbine's operation, Mr. Lyons said. Information about

higher-than-normal vibration levels or oil temperature can alert a

wind farm's staff to problems before they happen. Typically, the

wind turbines are connected by fiber-optic cable to a control

center. Many problems can be solved remotely, but staff members

must climb up through the tower to the nacelle on occasion.

Problems are increasingly rare, however. At FPL Energy, a

spokesperson said that the company's turbines were operating 96

percent of the time in 2002. And the Scada systems built into the

new generation of turbines achieve a near-autonomous level of

intelligence. In Hull, Mass., where the municipal light department

installed a single 660-kilowatt turbine on the edge of Boston

Harbor in 2001, the operations manager, John McLeod, said, "The

only time I go out there is to give tours."

One day last winter, the tiny cups on an anemometer that measures

wind speed on the turbine began gathering ice. The ice caused the

anemometer to spin abnormally slowly. The computer that governs

the windmill's operation was confused by the "slow" wind speed; it

seemed as if the windmill was generating too much power for such a

calm day. "So the turbine shut itself down," said Mr. MacLeod, who

runs the Hull Municipal Light Plant. "But the anemometer is

heated, and eventually the ice melted," and the turbine started

again. He added, "It diagnosed the problem itself and sent me a

fax letting me know what had happened."

The wind turbine in Hull, just beyond the end zone of the town's

high school football field, replaced an older model that had been

operating since 1985. (Windmills in Hull go back even further, to

the 1830's, when they were used to power a salt works on the

peninsula.) The old turbine was capable of generating 40 kilowatts

of electricity and was perched on an 80-foot tower; the new

turbine, made by Vestas, can generate up to 660 kilowatts of

power, and reaches 241 feet at the tip of its blades. It supplies

power for the town's traffic signals and streetlights, in addition

to meeting the electrical demands of as many as 250 homes,

depending on the day's wind speed.

Mr. MacLeod said he was planning a second wind turbine, possibly

an offshore model that would produce up to 3.6 megawatts.

To gauge where to erect wind turbines, developers put up

meteorological towers to measure the average wind speed and assess

whether it is high enough for electrical generation. In Princeton,

two towers have been collecting data since 2000. The information

is sent to a meteorological consultant under contract to the town,

using the same network cellular phones use.

As part of the plans for a wind farm off Cape Cod, a 197-foot

meteorological tower in Nantucket Sound takes readings of wind

speed and direction every six minutes for the developer, Cape Wind

Associates. Every 30 minutes, it captures information about wave

height and water currents. The data is sent to an office on the

mainland, where it is posted on a Web site (capewind.whgrp .com).

"It's on the Web to provide a service to the maritime community -

fishermen and recreational boaters," as well as ferry operators,

said Leonard Fagan, vice president of engineering for Cape Wind

Associates. The Web site also tries to influence the public, by

estimating how much "clean, local, renewable energy" the

prospective wind farm would be producing at any given moment.

The Cape Wind project has prompted some of the fiercest resistance

that any wind developer has encountered recently, although

projects in other parts of the country have been halted by

community opposition.

Even in Princeton, which has been home to eight wind turbines

since 1984, some residents oppose the installation of the two

larger machines. "The ones they're proposing to put up there are

massive," said John Bomba, who since 1988 has owned a restaurant

and banquet center that are within sight of the existing

windmills. "It's going to impact my business, which is mostly

high-end weddings. It will change the atmosphere."

Mr. Bomba, like the opponents of the Cape Wind Project, emphasized

that he was "for renewable energy, but we think there are

appropriate locations and sites for it." The Princeton windmill

farm is situated just outside a state nature reserve.

Despite the controversy, Mr. Fitch soon intends to dismantle and

sell his old windmills and erect two new ones. "We realize that

not everybody will like the look of it, but it's better than the

alternative, which is pollution," he said. He jokes that he is

competing with Mr. MacLeod to see whose town can generate more

power from the wind. (Currently, Mr. MacLeod has the lead, but Mr.

Fitch hopes to seize it next year when the two new turbines will

be capable of generating three megawatts of power.)

Better technology has prompted utilities and developers to

consider wind turbines, but another incentive is a federal tax

credit for operators of wind farms. For every kilowatt hour of

electricity generated, a wind farm operator can take 1.8 cents off

its federal tax bill. In addition, 13 states have established a

requirement called a renewable portfolio standard. It mandates

that utilities generate a certain percentage of their power from

renewable sources like wind.

In New Jersey, the standard requires that 6.5 percent of the

state's power come from renewable sources by 2012.

When wind projects were discussed 20 years ago, "you could safely

say that they were science projects," said Steve Zwolinski,

president of GE Wind Energy. "They've come of age now, and they're

really a viable technology."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy

| Search | Corrections | Help | Back to Top



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list