Monthly Archives: September 2017

What is wind turbine certification?

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Wind turbine type certificate: certification process steps

Wind turbine type certification is the accreditation, done by a reputable third party (“Certification Body”), that a manufacturer is selling a wind turbine that meet relevant standards and codes.

TUV, DNV-GL, Bureau Veritas (among others) are examples of Certification Body.

The scope of certification, according to the industry standard IEC 61400-22, can be:

  • Prototype certification: the evaluation of a new wind turbine design
  • Type certification: the evaluation of a wind turbine design and serial manufacturing process

Additionally, there are 2 other type of certifications are available:

  • Component certification: this is usually done for the most critical main components (e.g. the gearbox, transformer, etc.)
  • Project certification: the expected behavior of a group of WTGs on a specific project site. It would include the assessment of country specific laws and regulations, foundations, electrical network, etc.

In general type certification has several benefits, such as better credibility of a new WTG model and easier access to financing and to new markets. It makes clear that it’s possible to manufacture, install and maintain wind turbines of a certain model.

Therefore the type certification process is usually the most important - even if it's often achieved starting with prototype certification in a previous phase.

Type certification goes through several steps, some mandatory and some optional.

Mandatory steps are:

  1. Design basis evaluation. This step check if standards, assumptions, methodologies, etc. used in the design are in line with IEC 61400-22.
  2. Design evaluation. In this step the certification body verify that the design has been made following the design basis of the previous step.
  3. Manufacturing evaluation. Here a quality system evaluation and a manufacturing inspection are performed.
  4. Type testing. This is a set of laboratory and field tests to blades, gearbox, loads and power performance.
  5. Final Evaluation. In this step the findings of the evaluation are provided.

 The optional steps are the evaluation of the foundation design and foundation manufacturing plan and the measurement of type characteristics.

Wind farms: top 5 of myths & urban legends

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A curious consequence of writing a blog about wind farms is that every now and then I’m contacted by someone hating wind energy.

In the majority of the cases, the writer also ask for help to stop or boycott a wind farm somewhere in the word, apparently ignoring the fact that wind turbines help me to bring food on the table every night.

To add insult to injury, in the emails they often ask me support to confirm some pseudoscientific “facts” about wind turbines.

I’ve collected some of them in this post – other are coming from anti-wind energy propaganda websites that I read on the subway when I’m bored to discover new, unexpected effect of windmills.

Some of them are similar to the urban legend of the albino alligator in the sewers of New York.

Feel free to contribute!

5. Wind farms causes bush fires. Well, it’s true that (very, very infrequently) a wind turbine burns somewhere. But to say that they are burning woods and bushes it’s a bit too much.

4. The foundations are poisoning the water. Unless you pump 1 million cubic meters of bentonite to do a piled foundation nothing will happen to the water – a foundation is basically only a big stone.

3. The turbine is scaring the fishes – I’m not fishing as much as before. This is courtesy of a fisherman in Juchitan de Zaragoza (Oaxaca, Mexico). I doubt that a fish 10 meters underwater can really hear a WTG.

2. You need more energy to build a wind farm than the energy produced by the turbines. I’ve seen several (serious, scientific) papers on the subject. The energetic payback is usually only a few months.

And the winner is...

1. Wind farms change the weather locally. I love this one. The theory is that, slowing the wind, wind farms modify somehow the climate in the area – some urban legends say that they warm it, some others that they make it more foggy. Well, at least here in norther Germany where I’m living they are not making it any warmer.

Cryptocurrencies from wind energy

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In the first half of 2017 cryptocurrencies (like Bitcoin, Ether, etc.) experimented an incredible growth – considered a bubble by some and as a proof that times are changing by others.

What is interesting (at least to someone working in the renewables like me) is this link between cryptocurrencies and renewables.

Cryptocurrencies are created with a process called “mining”. In a nutshell, computational power is used to maintain the network of computer with the ledger of transactions. Computers, electricity and time to set up the network aren’t free. Therefore the “miners” are rewarded with new cryptocoins that can be converted in other currencies, products or goods.

An artist from Berlin, Julian Oliver, created an installation - a good example of conceptual art - to convert wind energy into electricity to mine cryptocurrencies (PDF here if the link doesn’t work). Appropriately, the name of the installation is “Harvest”.

I have seen several calculations of the energy necessary on a worldwide scale to run Bitcoin and other similar networks. It’s difficult to cross check the numbers but they look quite impressive. In one of this calculation the total power used is more than the energy needed by small countries like Cyprus.

On the short term I don’t foresee people purchasing multi megawatt WTGs to create cryptocurrencies. However, given the amount of power involved in computing, the idea to power datacenter with renewable sources of energies doesn’t look so unrealistic to me in several years from now.

 

Envision business model

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Internet is evolving very fast – now it’s possible to find a free and fast connection almost everywhere.

So, during a VERY long bus trip, I was able to get online and keep investigating on one of the fact that puzzle me more in the wind industry: the fact the Chinese WTG manufacturers are not gaining market share outside their home market.

I already wrote a post about this subject. However, today I just found online an interesting paper on this subject:

“Business model innovation for internationalization: the case of the Chinese wind turbine manufacturer Envision”.

Envision is one of the few (if any) exceptions to the rule: in the last months they have been able to win quite a lot of projects abroad, for instance in the Argentinian tenders RenovAR and RenovAR 1.5.

The authors of the paper think that the success of Envision is based on several key differences in their business model. You can obviously read the full document by yourself, but I will try to summarize the main ideas in this post.

A different marketing position. The concept is that they are selling “cheap technological wind turbines” filling a space in the market somewhere in between “cheap unreliable Chinese WTGs” and “expensive high tech European turbines”. I’m aware that I’m over simplifying here and I hope that no one will be offended.

“All-star”, international human resources. The idea here is that they started from the beginning with the very best specialists in each field, skipping (or shortening as much as possible) the initial learning phase.

The authors also states that they are “customer oriented”. I disagree with this point.

All company in the word needs to be customer oriented, otherwise they simply will not survive in a free, competitive market – they can only survive thanks to monopoly, trade barriers, etc. I think that all OEMs struggle to be customer oriented.

The fourth and last difference in the business model, according to the document, is “supply chain”. The idea is that Envision is using a peculiar mix of cheap China based sourcing and Key Partnerships with company such as Siemens, ABB, etc. to source the most critical elements of the turbines.

I also partially disagree with this concept. To the best of my knowledge, quite a lot of OEMs are purchasing a certain amount of components in China, while for other “business critical” component they have similar Key Partnership.