Author: Francesco Miceli
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Dobberzin WF
The photos below, stolen from LinkedIn, are from one of the last tenders I worked on. It is of the Dobberzin wind farm, with the Nordex concrete tower installed. Interesting to note how the keystones are assembled and joined together by grouting.
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Wind farm crane pads optimization: a solution with QGIS
QGIS is a great open source GIS software that I often use to display information in various formats (e.g. SHP). It has an interesting number of additional plug-ins that enhance its capabilities. Over this Christmas break I managed to find a few hours and have virtually finished developing a plug in that helps define the…
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Wind farm BoP optimizer
After several years pondering the possibility, I finally decided to try to build an app that automatically optimizes the BoP of wind farms. So, with the help of relatives who kept their children busy during the Christmas vacations and Claud.ia (Anthropic’s artificial intelligence) I began to complete the various elements. The idea is to solve…
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Power Factor and Reactive Energy Compensation in Wind Farms
A practical look at why capacitor banks end up in every wind farm substation, and what you need to understand about reactive energy compensation to specify them correctly. If you have been involved in the electrical design of a wind farm substation, maybe you have seen a capacitor bank in the single line diagram. It…
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From Environmental Impact Assessment to Construction
If you see the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) as a box-ticking exercise sitting between the developer and the permit, something written by environmental consultants, approved by authorities, filed away and forgotten – you should think again. That is a mistake. Every EIA contains a list of commitments, promises the developer makes to the community and…
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Optical Fibre Cables in Wind Farms — A Quick Guide to What Goes in the Trench
A short overview of the fibre optic cables used in wind farm SCADA networks: why they are dielectric, how they are built, and what to look for in a specification. If you have worked on a wind farm, you know that alongside the medium voltage power cables running from each turbine to the substation there…
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Lomas de Taltal
Another interesting video, again stolen on LinkedIn. It is about the wind farm developed by Goldwin in Taltal (the official name I believe is ‘Lomas de Taltal’). The area is especially interesting since it is one of the most extreme deserts in the world – we are in northern Chile, between Atacama and Antofagasta. If…
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Rotational Stiffness: The Check That (Often) Drives Foundation Size
Yes, sometimes the diameter of your gravity foundation is not governed by soil bearing capacity… Sometimes, when you run all the foundation design checks (bearing capacity, sliding, overturning, settlement…) you discover that the one that actually sizes the foundation is none of the above. It is rotational stiffness. This is the check that could drive…
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BoP cost in China
I stole this video from Gang Wang’s LinkedIn post. I saw in his profile that we were colleagues at Vestas years ago. A typical 20x5MW-191 HH160 hybrid ONWTG 100MW project’s CAPEX breakdown in CN mid-east low wind speed area: WTG: 1,600 RMB/kWHybrid Tower: 800 RMB/kWBOP: 1,400-1,800 RMB/kW The video is especially interesting for two reasons:…
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Esteyco’s braced foundation: an update
This article is an update to the post I have made some time ago on Esteyco’s Braced Foundation. I have been contacted by David Sarrasín, Product Development Director at Esteyco. He provided an interesting presentation of the braced foundation solution. He also gave me more context on the solution. This is the additional info he…