Author: Francesco Miceli
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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…
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Quality Control in BoP: what to check and when
Quality control in wind farm Balance of Plant is not glamorous. Nobody writes articles about it, and frankly nobody wants to be the person filling in forms at seven in the morning while the concrete truck is waiting to pour in the foundation pit. But some problems during construction could have been caught earlier if…
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Transporting wind turbine blades: when something goes wrong
A collection of videos featuring the transportation of wind turbine blades – some truly impressive.
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Live Long and Prosper: useful life of wind farms
The useful life of wind farms continues to increase. When I started working on the first wind projects in the 2000s, the ‘standard’ useful life was 20 years.Now it is not uncommon to see projects with a useful life of 30 or 35 years, and it seems that in some cases it is up to…
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Evolution of wind energy CapEx in the US
Wandering around the net, I found this interesting dataset of US wind projects:https://emp.lbl.gov/wind-energy-capital-expenditures-capex It is the parte of thw ‘Land-Based Wind Market Report 2022‘ study, done by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). It is a very interesting collection of data – the CapEx of dozens of wind projects built…
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Deep Impact: rising interest rates & wind energy
How strong was the impact of rising interest rates on the renewable energy sector? A lot, if we look at the S&P Global Clean Energy index. The index consists of the major companies in the renewable energy sector – not only folks likes of First Solar, Vestas and Ørsted (formerly Dong Energy), but also Chinese…
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What is a Site Assessment Report?
The Site Assessment report (also known as wind resource assessment or site suitability) is a document containing the results of a detailed study to confirm that a specific turbine model can be used in a project and how much energy it will produce. Both points are extremely important: not only is it necessary for the…
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Wind farm siting and environmental considerations
Wind farm siting, i.e. the decision of where to place the wind farm we are working on, is obviously crucial: while many other aspects can be changed at a later date (turbine model, tower height, installed power, etc.) the choice of the area in which we want to install the wind farm cannot be changed….