Author: Francesco Miceli

  • Offshore wind turbines foundation types

    Offshore is one of the fastest growing sectors in the renewable energy business in Europe. In 2010 more than 300 new turbines have been installed, reaching a total of more than 3000 MW connected to the grid. The number is not huge, but the offshore agenda is quite busy: more than 20.000 MW are expected…

  • Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) topography

    This is a new technology we are going to use in a wind farm we are going to build in Chile. The area that we need is too small to make LIDAR topography cost effective, but too big to use standard field topography: with this new solution we can have the needed data for a…

  • Wind Farm LIDAR topography

    LIDAR topography is the best available solution available nowadays. We have used it in several wind farms and I’m enthusiast of the results. It can be used to define earthworks with great precision. Basically it is made with an airplane flying with a laser, a digital camera and a GPS. The laser “sweep” the requested…

  • Repower Wind Turbines AutoCAD DWG Blocks

    Hello, Here you can download a DWG block of the Repower MM92. It has been made by Nuno França, a friend working in the renewable business. Repower MM92 AutoCAD DWG block

  • Wind farms projects using Google Earth topography

    One of the biggest problems in wind farms preliminary projects is the lack of a reliable topography. Due to the tight budgets developers are often working with, it is often impossible to obtain a good topography (like the ones you can get with a LIDAR instrumented flight) or at list a decent one (as the…

  • Wind farm project financing

    Project financing is a financial structure where debt providers rely on revenues generated by the wind farm to service and repay borrowing, and where the financing is secured by the project assets. It is a complex technique, that sees several parties involved in the project (equity, debt providers, power purchaser, land owner, WTG provider, etc.)…

  • Wind turbine foundation remedial work: an example

    The purpose of the remedial works in a damaged wind turbine foundation is to provide an alternative load path. Other operation that are normally done are injection of mortar or resins in the cracks and water sealing. Here you have an example of remedial works in case of foundation failure and subsequent tower movements. The…

  • Cracks in onshore wind turbines foundation

    The appearance of fissures in wind turbine foundations is a rather common event. There is no consensus in the sector about the root cause of the cracks. You can find a comprehensive family tree of fracture types below: From my experience it seems that old foundations with embedded ring are more prone to fissures compared…

  • Wind farm internal roads bends additional widening

    One of the problems frequently found in wind farm project and construction is that road bends with a reduced radius often needs an additional widening to allow the passage of the trucks with the WTGs components. Normally the biggest problems come with the blades. I suggest using a commercial software such as AutoTURN to estimate…

  • Wind power plant concepts and performance indicators

    Wind turbines are usually placed in clusters called wind farms, with sizes ranging from a few MW (sometimes even a single wind turbine is sold, for instance to a private investor or to give power to an energy intensive factory like a cement plant) up to several hundred MW. These clusters are connected to the…