WATCH: The challenges with big wind turbines
Did you miss Thomas Herzfelder Hansens presentation investigating the impact on engineering, manufacturing, commissioning, and farm-farm interaction due to the ongoing race for bigger turbines? Watch it here!
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The power produced by a wind turbine scales with the rotor diameter squared and for the last 23 years the turbine manufacturers have used this relationship to increase the capacity of offshore wind turbines from 2 MW to 16 MW, by increasing the rotor diameter from 76 meter to 264 meter.
The motivation for developing larger turbines for the offshore market is to increase energy capacity with the hope that the ‘economics of scale’ will bring down the cost of energy. So far, however, the quest for higher turbine capacity has not reduced the cost of offshore wind, and the European wind turbine manufacturers are now facing financial challenges. To complicate the situation further, the Chinese manufacturer Minyang Wind Power is currently working on a new turbine having a rotor diameter of 310 meter that will produce 22 MW of power.
In this presentation we investigate the impact on engineering, manufacturing, commissioning, and farm-farm interaction due to the ongoing race for bigger turbines.
Thomas Hansen has a PhD in wind energy from NTNU and works as an Associate professor at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL). He has more than 20 years’ work experience in engineering and research and recently worked two years for a Danish wind turbine manufacturer as aerodynamic engineer on offshore wind turbines.
